E-voting glitches, queues and activists hit voters

VOTERS grappled with partisan challenges to their registrations, broken equipment and other troubles yesterday as legions of lawyers, election-rights activists and computer scientists watched for signs of voter disenfranchisement.

Election officials in Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota fielded complaints of disruptions by the liberal interest group MoveOn.org, while in Ohio, a woman sued on behalf of people who did not receive absentee ballots on time, asking that they be allowed to cast provisional ballots.

In Philadelphia, Republican activists claimed voting machines already had recorded thousands of votes when polls opened. But city officials said the activists misunderstood numbers on odometers that records every vote ever cast not just those for this election.

Nearly one in three voters nationwide, including about half of those in Florida, were due to cast ballots using ATM-style voting machines that computer scientists have criticised for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning.

Other major concerns were over provisional ballots, new this presidential election and a potential source of delayed counts, and whether poll workers were adequately trained.

"To a certain extent, provisional ballots are second-class votes," said Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University. "You can cast a provisional ballot but we don't know if officials will count it."

Long lines greeted voters in many big cities in closely-contested states, and some polls opened late.

In South Carolina, problems were reported in precincts in two counties using electronic machines. Officials said voters had to switch to paper ballots.

And in Volusia County, Florida, a memory card in an optical-scan voting machine failed Monday at an early voting site and didn't count 13,000 ballots.

President of the citizens lobbying group Common Cause Chellie Pingree said her group was running a complaint hotline that logged 20,000 calls by 10am EST.

A separate website and phone hotline maintained by nonpartisan and liberal voting-rights activists fielded thousands of complaints, including from people who showed up at polling stations to discover they weren't registered.

Both parties had thousands of lawyers dispatched and on call to respond to trouble. In a decision early yesterday, a federal appeals court cleared the way for political parties to challenge voters' eligibility at polling places throughout Ohio.

Four years ago, the supreme court intervened in a recount after 36 days, handing George W Bush a 537-vote victory in Florida and with it the presidency.