WASHINGTON - Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana, Ohio, Miss. and Florida and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.
In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they couldn’t get to start properly until about 10 minutes after polls opened.
“We got five machines — one of them’s got to work,” said Willette Scullank, a troubleshooter from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, elections board.
In Mississippi's Hancock County, where voters were heading to the polls for the first time since it was clobbered by Hurricane Katrina, MSNBC found Pamela Metzler, circuit clerk for Hancock County, Miss., fuming.
“The equipment is just over the top for the average poll worker,” she fumed. “Hell, it’s over the top for me.”
Metzler said the Diebold touch-screen machines were “shoved down our throats” by Secretary of State Eric Clark as part of a deal that brought 77 of Mississippi’s 82 counties into compliance with the Help America Vote Act of 2002. Tuesday’s general election was the first big test of the system.
Metzler said the equipment problems were keeping some county residents from casting their ballots on their first attempt.
David Blount, communications director for Secretary of State Clark, said it was too early to tell how voting was going across the state’s 2,200 precincts where 650,000 voters, about a 30 percent turnout, were expected Tuesday.
In Indiana’s Marion County, about 175 of 914 precincts turned to paper because poll workers didn’t know how to run the machines, said Marion County Clerk Doris Ann Sadler. She said it could take most of the day to fix all of the machine-related issues.
Election officials in Delaware County, Ind., planned to seek a court order to extend voting after an apparent computer error prevented voters from casting ballots in 75 precincts there. County Clerk Karen Wenger said the cards that activate the machines were programmed incorrectly.
“We are working with precincts one by one over the telephone to get the problem fixed,” she said.
New machines cause headaches
At the Election Protection Coalition phone bank in Washington, D.C., where operators are fielding calls from voters complaining about poll troubles, electronic voting machine expert Matt Zimmerman said callers are complaining about the situation in Indiana.
Such glitches were not unexpected, he said.
"You have a lot of new machines in a lot of places, including in Indiana. Some people just don't know what they are doing," said Zimmerman, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who is working at the Election Protection Coalition phone bank.
"They may not have delivered the right equipment, or they couldn't turn the stuff on, or it may be they didn't have the poll workers properly trained. So you end up with situations like this," Zimmerman said.
Election watchdogs had worried about polling problems even before the voting began.
“This is largely what I expected,” said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting changes. “With as much change as we had, expecting things to go absolutely smoothly at the beginning of the day is too optimistic.”
A precinct in Orange Park, Fla. turned to paper ballots because of machine problems. Voting was delayed for 30 minutes or more at some Broward County precincts, where electronic ballots were mixed up and, in one case, a poll worker unintentionally wiped the electronic ballot activators.
‘People seem to be very confused’
In Illinois, some voters found the new equipment cumbersome.
“People seem to be very confused about how to use the new system,” said Bryan Blank, a 33-year-old librarian from Oak Park, Ill. “There was some early morning disarray.”
But voting equipment companies said they hadn’t seen anything beyond the norm and blamed the problems largely on human error.
“Any time there’s more exposure to equipment, there are questions about setting up the equipment and things like that,” said Ken Fields, a spokesman for Election Systems & Software Inc. “Overall, things are going very well.”
Some voters even liked the new ballots.
“It was much clearer on what you were voting for and you made sure you absolutely were voting for what you wanted to vote for,” said Cathy Schaefer, 59, of Cincinnati.
