Voting hit by breakdowns and late openings

US polling places experienced scattered problems today as legions of lawyers, election-rights activists and computer scientists watched for any trouble that could disenfranchise voters.

New rules, new voters and a tight presidential contest combined to create “a recipe for problems”, said Sean Greene, who was watching polls in Cleveland, Ohio for the Election Reform Information Project.

Nearly one in three voters, including around half of those in Florida, were expected to cast ballots usng 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 adequate and sufficiently 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.”

In Toledo, Ohio, a woman filed a lawsuit on behalf of people who did not receive absentee ballots on time, seeking permission for them to cast provisional ballots.

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

At one New Orleans precinct, all three voting machines were broken and voters were told to come back later, said Bill Quigley, a lawyer working for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In South Carolina, problems were reported in a handful of precincts in two counties using electronic machines. Officials said voters were forced to switch to paper ballots while technicians got the iVotronic touch screens from Electronic Systems & Software upand running within about 90 minutes.

Voters in one Richmond, Virginia, precinct using an old-style machine briefly cast ballots in the wrong congressional race.

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

Officials planned to feed the ballots, in which voters fill in a bubble, and count them today.

Tension was high at some Ohio polling places, including at one in Cleveland where a Democratic official claimed he was thrown out by a screaming poll judge before another told him he could return to the church basement.

Chellie Pingree, president of the citizens lobbying group Common Cause, said her group was running a toll-free voting complaint and information hot line that logged 20,000 calls by by 3pm Irish time.

“Many of the states where the election is closest and contested is where we’re hearing from people most,” she said.

Ms Pingree said high turnout meant “more confusion to already overburdened, understaffed polling places, many of which will have as many lawyers and poll challengers as they have people voting”.

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

“If people are not being formally denied the right to vote, they are having to work hard enough to vote that many of them will not have the opportunity,” said Will Doherty, executive director for the Verified Voting Foundation, a non-partisan voting-rights group.

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

A key problem is the lack of a unified voting system for the nation, the legacy of a patchwork of balloting technologies, regulations, partisan bickering and litigation.

Elections officials have been working to avoid problems like those in Florida that delayed results in the 2000 presidential election for several weeks.

The Supreme Court intervened in the recount after 36 days, handing George Bush a 537-vote victory over Democrat Al Gore in Florida and with it the presidency.