Potential voting woes loom for Super Tuesday

updated 6:35 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2008

Long lines, a shortage of poll workers and unprecedented numbers of mail-in ballots could delay vote counts in the biggest-ever Super Tuesday in American politics — a day in which nearly half the nation will cast ballots.

A record 24 states hold primaries and caucuses Tuesday, the result of a stampede by states to gain prestige and wield clout by moving up voting dates in the Democratic and Republican nominating races for the White House. These all-out charges toward Tuesday provide ample opportunities for confusion and stalled tallies, voting advocates say.

Adding to the list of possible delays: expectations of record-breaking voter turnout in contests expected to be close. Many of the states that moved up primaries have never been involved in one with meaningful impact, often resulting in low turnout in the past, said Tova Wang of The Century Foundation think tank.

So on Super Duper Tuesday, or Tsunami Tuesday, as some also have called it, voters across the country could face a number of difficulties — some new, some reincarnations of elections past.

In their haste to move up primaries, officials in some states appear to have overlooked ordinary facts of life, such as the weather and the advanced age of many poll workers. Cold northeastern states including Connecticut and New York have encountered problems recruiting poll workers because many senior citizens, a sizable percentage of paid volunteers, are still south for the winter. Snow in the middle of winter also could have an impact, especially if there’s bad weather on one end of a state and good weather on the other.

“There’s been a lot of concern about the weather, and poll workers not showing up,” said Wang. “In states where a lot of their senior citizens are snowbirds, counties were having a hard time getting poll volunteers.”

Calling poll workers
A significant shortage of poll workers forced Linda von Nessi, clerk to the Essex County Board of Election in New Jersey, to advertise in local newspapers. “People were either in Florida or they didn’t want to commit because of the possibility of cold weather,” she said. She has added 207 people to replace her diminished ranks. “We’ve never had to hire that many new people,” she said.

But even sunbelt states have felt the pinch. As of Thursday, some California election officials were still recruiting poll workers on their Internet sites.

Super Tuesday “is really like a national primary,” said Doug Chapin of electionline.org, funded by The Pew Center on the States. “And the thing that’s really striking about 2008 is we’re still seeing a tremendous amount of change and a great deal of uncertainty” in the final days leading to Super Tuesday.

If state contests produce tight margins and too-close-to-call races, Chapin said demands for recounts could abound. In New Hampshire, Democrats asked for a recount after Jan. 8 primary results differed widely from pre-election polls.

“If people are unhappy with the results, you may see the same kind of back-and-forth we saw in 2000,” Chapin said, when Florida’s recount went to the U.S. Supreme Court and George W. Bush was declared the victor weeks after the November election.

Expect delays, more work
In California, the most populated state and highest possessor of electoral votes, some election officials have already warned that vote counts will be far later than normal. Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder Dean Logan said record numbers of mail-in ballots and an anticipated deluge of voters could delay final primary results.

Election officials in 21 other counties, including heavily populated Riverside, San Diego, San Bernardino and Santa Clara, are struggling to implement what many consider a last-minute shift from controversial electronic machines to paper ballots. The change was mandated after the secretary of state decertified nearly all the state’s electronic voting machines, saying they were vulnerable to errors and sabotage.

In some areas, stacks of paper ballots must be driven to centralized counting facilities and fed by hand into optical scanners. Mail-in ballots, estimated at 40 percent of the vote in Los Angeles County, also must be hand-fed into counting machines. A test run in San Bernardino County showed that scanners could only count 10,000 votes per hour.

Some local elections officials say that could lead to an increase in ballot errors, such as voting twice or leaving races blank. Without those machines at individual precincts, poll workers will not be able to catch mistakes until hours later at county headquarters.

“It’s much more work for our poll workers,” said San Bernardino County Registrar Kari Verjil. “It’s very time consuming.”

Verjil has 4,000 touch-screen machines sitting in storage, for which the county paid $16 million.

“It’s going to be a return to all these things that got us going with electronic voting in the first place,” said northern California Contra Costa County registrar Steve Weir, who also heads the statewide registrars association.

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