ID rules, machines early voting problems

Anick Jesdanun

Electronic voting machine problems frazzled voters and election workers in dozens of precincts as the polls opened Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana and Ohio and leaving some in Florida with little choice but turn to paper ballots instead.

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

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

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.

“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.

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

Election experts say both types of voting machines are bound to cause trouble.

Poll workers also might not be adequately trained to handle the unexpected, which can cause delays as voters were already discovering Tuesday.

“Elections have hundreds and hundreds of moving parts, and most of those parts have to do with humans,” said Michelle Shafer, spokeswoman for Sequoia Voting Systems Inc. “There will be isolated issues throughout the nation I‘m sure. That‘s just the normal part of elections. Overall we feel confident things will go pretty well.”

Many states established voter registration databases for the first time, and many found problems as they tried to match drivers‘ license and Social Security data with the voter rolls.

Someone may have a middle initial or use “Jr.” on one list but not the other, or “Doug” and “Douglas” may be interchanged in records. Data entry errors also occur.

Although not required by federal law, some states also passed new voter identification requirements, in many cases calling for a government-issued photo ID, rather than just a utility bill.

Courts have struck down specific ID requirements in several states, but election watchdogs warned that poll workers might still mistakenly turn voters away. Missouri‘s chief elections official, Robin Carnahan, said she was asked three times to show a photo ID, despite a court ruling striking the requirement down there.

In one of the worst fiascoes, Maryland election officials forgot to send the cards primary voters needed to activate electronic machines at their polling places, and some voters had to cast provisional ballots on scraps of paper.

In New Mexico, some voters complained they had received phone calls giving them incorrect information about where in vote.

Several Florida counties stocked up ahead of the election with extra voting machines, paper ballots and poll workers on standby. Apart from the state‘s infamous chads in 2000, Florida voters have struggled with poorly trained poll workers, trouble tallying electronic votes and precincts opening late or closing early.

Secretary of State Sue Cobb said she didn‘t expect serious problems with the touch-screen voting machines this time.

“History has shown that the machines are far more accurate than paper so we‘re quite confident in it,” Cobb said. “There is absolutely no reason to believe that there will be any security issues, any hacking going on.”

A coalition that includes the NAACP planned to send nonpartisan poll monitors to some Florida counties. The Justice Department also was deploying polling watchers at potential trouble spots nationwide.

© 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.