Frustration greets some as turnout at polls is high
Election officials deal with problems
More than 57 percent of Allegheny County voters cast ballots in the the midterm elections Tuesday, magnifying reports of malfunctioning machines and mishaps at polling locations that frustrated some voters.
As polls closed at 8 p.m., county officials stressed the election overall played out without any major issues and that county elections staffers rushed to fix issues that popped up.
Yet the heavy interest in the midterms — which, across the state, would determine an 18seat congressional delegation, a U.S. senator, Pennsylvania governor and lieutenant governor, half of the state Senate, and a full state House — brought more attention to an array of problems seen throughout the county.
Of the county’s 941,033 registered voters, 57.34 percent of them cast ballots.
Absentee ballots, an early measure of voter interest,
surged to a higher total than any midterm contest since at least 2006, according to the county. Absentee ballots submitted in the county reached 26,840 this year, compared with 10,295 ballots in 2014, the county said.
The county cited the high volume of absentee ballots this year as it faced criticism by the American Civil Liberties Union over how it managed some of them.
Earlier Tuesday, ACLU attorneys at the Allegheny County election court argued that there were unprecedented problems this election with absentee ballots not arriving to voters on time.
Caroline Mitchell of the ACLU of Pennsylvania and Vote PA has worked election integrity for years and said, “We’ve never seen this much of a problem with absentee ballots before.”
The problem was exacerbated by a county elections division that did not answer phones or offer updates to applicants who were concerned about the status of their ballots, she said. If a ballot was not returned to the county by Friday, Nov. 2, it would not be legitimate, even if the application requesting it was submitted in a timely fashion.
People who showed up to vote at the Carnegie Library’s Squirrel Hill branch at Murray and Forbes avenues faced long lines after the polling place did not open on time. The judge of elections there had a medical emergency and could not open the poll as scheduled at 7 a.m., according to officials.
At least 30 people were waiting outside the library by 8 a.m. Many more were waiting inside the library’s entrance on Marlborough Avenue.
Kara Tinker, 28, waited for nearly two hours.
“I have the flexibility with my work, and I think it’s important for people to know what’s going on,” she said. “So I’m texting and tweeting. I want to see what the outcome of this situation will be.”
The equipment needed to open the machines also was not on site. Emergency ballots were delivered shortly after 8 a.m. and three voters at a time were allowed inside to fill out the ballots.
An election worker said the ballots would be sealed and counted after the polls closed.
At 9:15 a.m., 45 voters had cast emergency paper ballots. At that time, voting machines were still not up and running.
Laure Swearingen, 64, of Squirrel Hill, noted that the library is near Tree of Life synagogue, where a gunman killed 11 worshipers on Oct. 27.
“This is like a slap in the face,” she said.
County officials also contended with voting machine irregularities. Calls into the county and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described instances of “vote switching,” the term for when a voter selects one candidate and another is chosen instead.
Tanner I vol, 34, of South Fayette, said he voted a straight Republican ticket at the Hunting Ridge Meeting House near Bridgeville and the voting machine instead showed that he had voted straight Democrat. He recast his vote, picking every individual Republican candidate separately and was assured by poll workers that he’d voted for all Republican candidates for office. Still, he said he was unsure.
“You hit one party and the whole other party came up,” he said. “You can’t switch the party affiliation at the top for some reasons. After you hit that vote button, you don’t know what happens.”
Allegheny County spokeswoman Amie Downs said elections officials were sent to the South Fayette polling place to investigate the report, but the problem had not been confirmed.
Saul Markowitz, a communications professional, was voting at Kerr Elementary School in O’Hara when the machine automatically selected Republican state Senate candidate Jeremy Shaffer when he wanted to vote for Democrat Lindsey Williams.
The poll workers told him that “we’ve never seen this happen before,” and, after numerous tries to reset his ballot, eventually achieved his vote for Ms. Williams. He said poll workers gave him a number to call to report the machine problems, but no one picked up when he tried in the afternoon.
“Why can’t we bring back the paper ballots?” Mr. Markowitz wondered.
Officials said vote switching had been reported in West Deer (7th District), Plum (20th District) and Moon (6th District). In each case, they said, a technician was sent out to try to replicate the issue and possibly recalibrate the machine.
Despite the issues, many polling locations recorded heavy turnout.
Some of the heaviest voting took place at Penn State University and the University of Pittsburgh, both of which surpassed 2014 overall turnout in the first five hours, according to NextGen Pennsylvania, a progressive organization focused on turning out youth to vote.
Turnout at Penn State’s main precinct Tuesday was four times as much as it was in the 2014 midterms, and Pitt was closing in on tripling its own 2014 total, according to an official with NextGen Pennsylvania.
At the William Pitt Union in Oakland, nearly 100 students waited in a line that, at 2:30 p.m., snaked outside the building. The building serves as a polling place for the city’s 4th Ward, 8th District. Students from Pitt’s 18 residence facilities filled six polling places in Oakland.
Several of the waiting students listed gun control, climate change and the environment, human rights, racial equality, and education as their top priorities for the midterm election.
Chief among the issues important to recent Pitt graduate Miranda Boca, 24, are racial equality and public health. She said both issues hit close: Her boyfriend is a person of color and her cousin is a cancer survivor who can no longer receive vaccines.
“I don’t like the direction the country is going in,” said Ms. Boca, who graduated with a degree in chemistry. “Everyone’s anti-science and anti-each other. All the hateful rhetoric is just appalling. I feel like the only thing we can do is vote.”
Just ahead of Ms. Boca, Pitt senior Ben Engel, 22 and an information science major, waited in line wearing a black T-shirt with a gold broken heart on the front — an image that became popular following the mass shootings in Squirrel Hill.
“I’m hoping to try and make change,” he said.
Other problems the county reported throughout the day included:
● Bellevue, Ward 1, District 2: The judge overslept and the polling place opened late.
● Pittsburgh, Ward 4, Districts 10 and 11: Voting started late due to issues with opening a machine.
● McCandless, Ward 1, District 1: The polling place opened at 7:15 a.m. Paper ballots were used until that time.
● County authorities said a Duquesne Light Co. transformer failed on Old Clairton Road, leaving 14 voting districts — along with nearly 2,000 customers — without power. A utility spokeswoman said the outage lasted a little less than an hour.