Ohio pulls plug on electronic voting

An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

"The battle is over and electronic voting machines, at least in Ohio, are dead. After years of wrangling and protests, Secretary of State Ken Blackwell announced Wednesday that he will limit Ohio's uncompleted voting-machine conversion to a single device: the precinct-count optical-scan machine. The decision effectively sidelines the embattled touch-screen voting machines that protesters portrayed as razor-toothed, vote-eating monsters prone to hacking. An Ohio security review completed in December 2003 uncovered dozens of security risks in the machines, many of which companies were working to fix."

"The exception is that one electronic machine per voting location is required for the disabled."