Poll problems: Faulty machines, rejected ballots and long lines
Civil rights groups and election officials fielded thousands of reports of voting irregularities across the country Tuesday, with voters complaining of broken machines, long lines and untrained poll workers improperly challenging Americans’ right to vote.
The loudest of those complaints came from Georgia, where issues of race, ballot access and election fairness have fueled an acrimonious governor’s contest between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. Abrams, a former state lawmaker, is vying to be the nation’s first-ever black woman governor, while Kemp, the secretary of state who oversees elections, has faced accusations of trying to suppress the minority vote.
In one downtown Atlanta precinct, voters waited three hours to cast ballots after local election officials initially sent only three voting machines to serve more than 3,000 registered voters. In suburban Gwinnett County, the wait surpassed four hours, as election officials opened the polls only to discover that their voting machines weren’t working at all, voters said.
The wave of complaints from voters came at the end of a campaign season dominated by concerns about ballot access and voting rights. It remained unclear Tuesday how many of the complaints were legitimate, how many voters were affected and whether the problems would affect the outcome of any races.
The spike in reports of voting problems coincided with heightened enthusiasm across the country to participate in this year’s races, with early voting tallies in dozens of states far outpacing those of 2014.
On Tuesday, elections officials in states including Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Indiana and Georgia extended voting hours to contend with long lines outside polling locations.
A coalition of civil rights groups reported receiving more than 17,000 complaints of voting irregularities by midafternoon — a higher call volume than in any recent midterm election — and referred many of them to state and local election officials, the groups said in a news conference in Washington.
Together, the organizations have deployed about 6,500 lawyers and monitors across 30 states to protect ballot access — more than in any previous election.
Voting rights advocates said some of the problems are the result of older equipment that hasn’t been replaced in more than a decade. The machines date back to shortly after the presidential recount in Florida in 2000, when Congress sent billions of dollars to the states to replace outdated equipment. Another round of replacement is overdue, advocates said.
Across the country, reports about huge turnout were punctuated with complaints about voters who faced obstacles to casting their ballots.
In North Dakota, a voting rights lawyer said dozens of Native American voters were being turned away because of issues with their identification. Poll workers were rejecting identification issued by tribal officials, advising voters not to initial ballots — even though the law requires it — and discouraging voters from casting provisional ballots when they arrived without proper identification, according to Carla Fredericks, director of the Indian Law Clinic at the University of Colorado.
Accusations of intimidation surfaced after U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced plans to run a “crowd control” exercise Tuesday near a Hispanic neighborhood in El Paso — the hometown of Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Republican Sen. Ted Cruz.
On Tuesday morning, the agency abruptly canceled the exercise after critics raised concerns about voter suppression.