New York Times: Voting Problems Surface as Americans Go to the Polls
New York Times: Voting Problems Surface as Americans Go to the Polls
From closed polling sites to malfunctioning machines, Election Day brought frustration for some voters in contests shadowed by questions about the security and fairness of the electoral system.
In Gwinnett County, Ga., four precincts — out of 156 — suffered prolonged technical delays, while some voting machines in South Carolina lacked power or the devices needed to activate them. There was also some confusion in Allegheny County, Pa., which includes Pittsburgh, where at least four polling places were changed in the last two days.
Voters who went to a polling place in Chandler, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb, found the doors locked and a legal notice announcing that the building had been closed overnight for failure to pay rent. (Officials later reopened the location.) In Houston, a worker was removed from a polling site and faced an assault charge amid a racially charged dispute with a voter, The Houston Chronicle reported.
Problems with casting ballots are a regular feature of Election Day, and making sense of them could take days and weeks. But the number of calls to voting hotlines maintained by a collection of advocacy groups quickly outpaced those received in the last midterm election of 2014. …
Voters at the regional centers were being turned away or endured long waits after printers that produce ballots tailored to their home precincts malfunctioned, according to Common Cause, which was monitoring polling problems. …
The Justice Department deployed election monitors to 35 jurisdictions in 19 states, but Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, drew concern among Democrats for emphasizing fraud as well as civil rights.
“We are dealing with a very different climate in 2018,” said Karen Flynn, the president of Common Cause. “We do not have a Department of Justice that is working hand in hand with our network to be solving these problems, we don’t have the protections of the Voting Rights Act, and we have a president that is putting out messages that can feel threatening to many voters.”
In El Paso, the federal Border and Customs Protection agency abruptly canceled an exercise along the Mexico border Tuesday morning after civil-rights groups and Democratic leaders complained of voter intimidation. The crowd-control exercise would have taken place near a border crossing adjacent to the heavily Latino Chihuahuita neighborhood, and less than a half mile from a polling station used by Latino voters.