US voters entangled in voting machine problems

Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts in today’s US elections, delaying voters in several states and forcing some to use paper ballots instead.

In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they could not get to start properly until about 10 minutes after polls opened.

“We got five machines – one of them’s got to work,” said Willette Scullank, a trouble shooter from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, elections board.

In Indiana’s Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper because poll workers did not know how to run the machines, said County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. She said it could take most of the day to correct all the machine-related issues.

Election officials in Delaware County, Indiana, extended voting hours because voters initially could not cast ballots in 75 precincts Karen Wenger, the country clerk, said the cards that activate the push-button machines were programmed incorrectly but the problems were fixed by late morning.

Pennsylvania’s Lebanon County also extended polling hours because a programming error forced some voters to cast paper ballots.

With a third of Americans voting on new equipment and voters navigating new registration databases and changed ID rules, activist groups had been worried about polling problems even before election day.

“This is largely what I expected,” said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a non-partisan group that tracks voting changes. “With as much change as we had, expecting things to go absolutely smoothly at the beginning of the day is too optimistic.”

Electronic ballots got mixed up at some precincts in Broward County, Florida, and in Utah County, Utah, workers failed to properly encode cards that voters use to bring up touchscreen ballots.

In Illinois, there were complaints the new equipment was cumbersome.

“People seem to be very confused about how to use the new system,” said Bryan Blank, a 33-year-old librarian from Oak Park, Illinois. “There was some early morning disarray.”

But voting equipment companies said they hadn’t seen anything beyond the norm and blamed the problems largely on human error.

“Any time there’s more exposure to equipment, there are quesions about setting up the equipment and things like that,” said Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems & Software Inc. “Overall, things are going very well.”

Some voters even saidthey liked the new ballots.

“It was much clearer on what you were voting for and you made sure you absolutely were voting for what you wanted to vote for,” said Cathy Schaefer, 59, of Cincinnati.

Though at least one political candidate also had trouble casting his ballot at a polling station, he could not blame the voting machine. Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina, was initially turned away from the ballot box because he forgot his voter’s egistration card, but he returned later with a new card to cast his vote.

Other problems also had nothing to do with machines. Power failures in Denver knocked out laptops used to verify voter registration, and in North Carolina about 100 voters waited nearly an hour at a church because the person with the key didn’t show up. In Kentucky’s Bourbon County – famous for its whiskey – a school board race had been left off some ballots, requiring the county clerk to make up paper ballots on the spot.

Although turnout generally is lower in midterm elections – when the presidency is not at stake – trouble had been expected because this year was the deadline for many of the election changes enacted after the Florida balloting chaos of 2000.

Under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, states have replaced outdated voting equipment, established state-wide voter registration databases, required better voter identification and arranged for prvisional ballots should something goes wrong.

Control of Congress is also at stake this year, and because individual congressional races are generally decided by fewer votes than presidential contests, any problems at the polls are more likely to affect the outcome.

According to Election Data Services, a Washington, DC, consulting firm, 32 percent of registered voters were using equipment added since the 2004 elections.

Many states established voter registration databases for the first time and found problems matching drivers’ license and Social Security data with voter rolls, sometimes simply because a middle initial had been used on some types of ID but not on the list of voters.

Although not required by federal law, some states passed new voter identification requirements. While courts struck down photo ID requirements in several states, Missouri’s chief elections official, Robin Carnahan, said she was still asked three times to show a photo ID, despite a court ruling striking the requirement down in that Midwest state.