Millions of Americans showed up to vote Tuesday, confronting long lines and a slew of new voting laws.
12:11AM EST November 7. 2012 - Americans overcame epic lines, confusion about new laws and even polling places crammed into tents in parts of the Northeast that were still without electricity to cast their ballots Tuesday.
Even before lunchtime, a handful of those partisan disputes and Election Day glitches started spilling into courtrooms. Still, most of the hassles voters faced were isolated, and none was substantial enough to change the outcome of an election that secured a second term for President Obama.
Many problems — and certainly the most closely watched — came in battleground states widely expected to determine the outcome of the presidential election. Voters reported waiting in line for hours at some polling sites in Florida and Virginia and encountering malfunctioning voting machines in key Ohio precincts.
"It was a long line but everything was orderly and, for most people, that's their experience on Election Day: an orderly process," said Michael McDonald, an election law expert at Virginia's George Mason University. "There's no shouting, nothing going on. Everybody manages to vote, and it's done."
Still — as happens every Election Day — reports of problems piled up nationwide. By Tuesday evening, civil rights groups said they had fielded more than 88,600 such reports on a website and telephone hotline.
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One of the most common complaints, they said, came from confusion over new voting laws that require people to show identification before casting a ballot. Those measures, which backers said were designed to prevent fraud, drew widespread criticism from civil rights groups, who feared that the poor, minority and elderly voters who are less likely to have identification would be disenfranchised. Some voter-ID laws were rejected in court, but others went into effect this year.
In Pennsylvania, civil rights groups complained that workers at some polling sites were requiring voters to show identification, even though a federal judge decided last month that the state's new voter-ID law could not be enforced this year. That led to some voters being turned away, said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. In Pittsburgh, she said, voters reported being told outside the polls that they would need to show a photo ID inside.
"It is absolutely unconscionable, and people ought to be ashamed," she said.
Matthew Keeler, a spokesman for Pennsylvania's elections office, said officials heard of only a "few scattered reports" of people being asked for identification when they should not have been. He said that state officials had contacted elections workers in those counties to make sure people were able to vote. "Nobody is supposed to be turned away," he said.
In Connecticut, where legislators rejected a measure that would have required voters to show a photo ID, poll workers in a handful of towns had incorrectly asked for more ID than required, said Av Harris, a spokesman for the Connecticut secretary of State. State law allows voters there to show a utility bill or Social Security card as identification.
Other disputes were headed to court by midday.
In Philadelphia, GOP officials went to court after accusing Democratic poll workers of excluding their volunteers from voting sites. A court quickly ruled that they must be let in.
And in Ohio, where officials reported scattered problems with electronic voting machines, a federal judge Tuesday rejected a challenge to the use of those machines. U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost said in a written order that the Green Party candidate who brought the challenge "demonstrated zero likelihood of success based on the evidence presented." Another federal judge scheduled a hearing for Wednesday morning in a lawsuit challenging the way Ohio counts provisional ballots.
"Long lines, machine breakdowns, fights at the polls. Unfortunately, this is the new normal for Election Day," Richard Hasen, a University of California-Irvine election-law expert, quipped on Twitter.
Still, most of the hassles voters endured Tuesday had to do with the sorts of routine delays, malfunctions and confusion that seem to confound at least a few cities in every election.
Voters were still in line more than an hour after Virginia's polls closed at 7 p.m. State elections chief Don Palmer blamed a shortage of electronic poll books in some counties, plus heavy turnout and a late rush of voters. Florida officials said turnout and voting glitches contributed to long lines there. Hundreds of people around Miami were still waiting in line three hours after voting ended there; some had been there for more than four hours.
In Byers, Colo., a small town of about 1,160 where many people make their living farming, the wait to vote at the American Legion Post 160 was 45 minutes to an hour as officials struggled with new electronic ballots. "This morning, it was chaos," said Diana Taylor, an elections judge working at the polling station. "We had trouble with the new electronic system — just trying to find people. If we can't find people in the electronic system, we look them up in another electronic system and then a paper system."
And in Florida's Pinellas County, around St. Petersburg, elections officials mistakenly told voters they had until 7 p.m. Wednesday to cast ballots. Polls actually closed Tuesday evening.
Voting — and voting problems — started well before Election Day, as campaigns pressed their supporters to vote early. McDonald said he expected that more than a third of the votes in this year's presidential contest would have been cast before the polls opened Tuesday morning.
Among those issues:
- Storm fallout: Superstorm Sandy created election chaos in parts of New York and New Jersey. Officials struggled to reopen or relocate polling stations damaged by the storm, but some still lacked power Tuesday, and others were too damaged to use at all. Both states said they would let people displaced by last week's storm cast their ballots at any polling station. New Jersey said people could vote by e-mail, though technical problems surfaced Monday in some counties. But confusion reigned in some damaged areas on Tuesday. In Hoboken, N.J., Matthew Ohlsen said officials still hadn't processed his application for an electronic ballot, but a voter information hotline warned that if he tried to vote in person, he might get in trouble for trying to vote twice. "I have no idea what to do or how to vote," he said. New Jersey officials said they would extend online voting through Friday evening.
- Early voting delays: Voters overwhelmed polling locations in South Florida over the weekend. Some voters complained they waited in line for hours before finally being able to cast a ballot. The Florida Democratic Party went to federal court Sunday to try to force officials to extend early-voting hours to cope with the problems. Voters also confronted long early-voting lines in Washington, D.C.
- Voter ID laws: For the first time, voters in Virginia and several other states were required to show identification at the polls. Those identification laws, which supporters said were aimed at preventing fraud, drew widespread criticism from voting rights advocates, who said they could prevent tens of thousands of eligible voters from casting ballots. Courts blocked or delayed some of the toughest ID laws, but critics said they still feared people might not vote if they thought they still had to show identification.
- Provisional ballot uncertainty: Ohio's Republican secretary of State has instructed elections officials not to count provisional ballots if voters don't completely fill in their identification information. Those ballots could prove crucial in determining who wins Ohio's 18 electoral votes. A federal judge has said he will decide on a challenge to those restrictions before provisional ballots must be counted Nov. 17. There is "potentially a huge number of votes" that could be affected, said Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
- Voting machine errors: The Republican National Committee asked elections officials in six states to recalibrate electronic voting machines after reports that voters who tried to cast ballots for Romney found that their votes instead went to Obama. State officials generally said they did not see problems with the machines.
Contributing: Yamiche Alcindor, Gary Stoller; the Associated Press
Source: http://www.news.theusalinks.com/2012/11/06/voting-issues-surface-in-battleground-states/
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