Voting problems crop up early on Election Day

WASHINGTON - Programming errors and inexperience with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana and Ohio and leaving some in Florida with little choice but use paper ballots instead.

In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they couldn’t get to start properly.

“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 didn’t know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. She said it could take most of the day to fix all of the machine-related issues.

Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts there. Delaware County Clerk Karen Wenger said the cards that activate the machines were programmed incorrectly.

“We are working with precincts one-by-one over the telephone to get the problem fixed,” Wenger said.

New machines cause headaches
At the Election Protection Coalition phone bank in Washington D.C., where operators are fielding calls from voters complaining about poll troubles, electronic voting machine expert Matt Zimmerman said callers are complaining about the situation in Indiana. Such glitches were not unexpected, he said.

Decision 2006 multimedia Getty Images   Slide show: Election Voters head to the polls in elections that could shift control of Congress and the Senate.

"You have a lot of new machines in a lot of places, including in Indiana. Some people just don't know what they are doing," said Zimmerman, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is working at the Election Protection Coalition phone bank. 

"They may not have delivered the right equipment, or they couldn't turn the stuff on, or it may be they didn't have the poll workers properly trained. So you end up with situations like this," Zimmerman said.

Some watchdogs expected problems
With a third of Americans voting on new equipment and voters navigating new registration databases and changing ID rules, election watchdogs worried about polling problems even before the voting began.

“This is largely what I expected,” said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan 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. Every problem is one problem too many, but some problems are always to be expected on election days.”

A precinct in Orange Park, Fla., turned to paper ballots because of machine problems. In Illinois, some voters found the new equipment 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, Ill. “There was some early morning disarray.”

Deadline for many election changes
Although turnout generally is lower in midterm elections, this year was the deadline for many of the election changes enacted in the wake of the Florida balloting chaos of 2000.

The 2002 Help America Vote Act required or helped states to replace outdated voting equipment, establish statewide voter registration databases, require better voter identification and provide provisional ballots so qualified voters can have a say if something goes wrong.

“There has not been an election in decades that has had this much change,” said Wendy Weiser, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school.

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