Election glitches impede voters nationwide

The nonpartisan research group that tracks states’ voting procedures found that long lines, machine malfunctions and human error resulted in people choosing not to vote, or votes being counted incorrectly nationwide. On top of that, voter fraud and intimidation and the occasional freak occurrence – including bomb threats and invasive squirrels – stymied voters.          

“I think anytime a registered voter shows up to vote and for any reason can’t, this is an egregious problem, so whether it was a voting machine error or a poll book or ballot design, these are all egregious,” said Dan Seligson, the editor of electionline.org, who said the states with the most complaints and problems were Pennsylvania, Colorado and Florida.

Machine malfunctions caused by computer and human error turned up in many states. The most frequent problem was vote flipping, when voters chose one candidate only to have the machine mark another. This happened in at least a dozen states, including Florida, Illinois, Ohio and Texas.

Poll workers had problems turning on machines and difficulty feeding paper ballots into optical scanners. In Florida, Sarasota County has made daily headlines because of a disputed congressional race that registered 18,000 undervotes, or ballots where voters chose no candidate for the race.

Colorado topped the list of states that experienced problems with voter registration. Denver County used electronic poll books connected to its voter database, but the computers froze several times, in some cases taking as long as 20 minutes to verify a name, and forced poll workers to restart the machines. Voters waited in lines for up to three hours and the Denver mayor promised to void any parking tickets issued while voters waited.

Meanwhile, voters in Indiana and Ohio found their names weren’t on the list of registered voters, while the rolls in Rhode Island and New York included the names of 5,000 and 77,000 dead voters, respectively. In New York, there were potentially as many as 2,600 votes cast by “politically active corpses,” voters whose names also appeared on an official list of the deceased, the report said.

A slew of new voter identification laws, which often were challenged in court, resulted in confusion in some states as to what identification was needed to vote. Poll workers often asked for unnecessary identification in states like Georgia, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin.

Even notable voters faced this quandary. Indiana, with its toughest-in-the-nation law requiring state-issued photo identification, saw few problems, although one state legislator presented his Indiana House of Representatives ID and still wasn’t allowed to vote until he named the last four digits of his Social Security number.

In Missouri, which had passed a voter photo identification requirement that was later thrown out by the courts, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan tried to vote absentee using only her voter registration card, which is allowed. Carnahan said she was asked three times for photo identification before being allowed to vote without displaying it, according to newspaper accounts.

Ballot shortages

Poor planning caused problems in several areas. Precincts in Boston ran out of ballots, forcing police cruisers to rush ballots to polling places. Afterward, the Massachusetts secretary of state threatened to take over the Boston Elections Department in future elections.

New Mexico had few woes, but two precincts with 2,000 registered voters only received 150 ballots because a zero was left off the ballot order.

Voter fraud and intimidation

There were reports in Virginia that voters had received phone calls telling them to stay away from the polls, while in Tucson, Ariz., three men – one with a clipboard, one with a camcorder, and one with a gun – harassed Latino voters waiting in line, taking pictures and asking them to sign a petition to protest Spanish-language election materials.

This election saw its share of odd incidents. In Pennsylvania, one voter smashed a $5,000 touch-screen machine – which more than 130 people had already voted on – with a metal paperweight, then sat on the ground and waited for the police.

In Oklahoma, a squirrel chewed through an electrical cable, causing several polling stations to lose power.

In Wisconsin, a bomb scare briefly closed a voting precinct.

In Kentucky a voter was choked by a poll worker who was later charged with assault and interfering with an election. 

However, the report also put the spotlight on some positives in this election. Maryland, which had a disastrous primary, was able to correct those issues and run relatively problem-free elections.

The election also saw all but two states comply with the HAVA requirement to provide people with disabilities with a secret and independent way to vote.