Long queues and equipment failures mar the start of the US elections
Tens of millions of Americans are at the polls today as hours-long lines, sporadic equipment failures and confusion about polling places are being reported.
Problems cropped up Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and other key battleground states that could decide whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump becomes the president of the United States.
Most of these issues have plagued the polls for decades, however, rather than incidents of voter fraud or intimidation fueled by Trump’s warning of a “rigged” election.
These issues included voters being asked to provide specific forms of identification that are not required, and Hispanic voters finding no Spanish speakers to assist them, which also occurred in Florida.
“There is tremendous disruption at the polls today,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “This election may be the most chaotic election … in the last 50 years.”
The most widespread problems appeared to occur in North Carolina and Colorado, two crucial swing states:
- In Durham, N.C., where electronic poll books used to check voter registration were down, forcing voters to wait longer and use paper back-up copies. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed a lawsuit late Tuesday afternoon in hopes of forcing the Durham County Board of Elections to keep polls open an additional 90 minutes, until 9 p.m.
- And in Colorado, portions of the state’s voter-verification system went down for about 30 minutes in the afternoon, briefly forcing state officials to issue provisional ballots to an undisclosed number of voters, and also briefly preventing them from processing mail ballots. The cause of the problem was under investigation.
While racial and ethnic minorities had felt threatened by Trump’s calls for self-styled poll watchers, few examples of discrimination were reported. In Ohio, the eligibility of some black voters was challenged at the polls, according to voting rights groups.
Voters in a heavily Somalian-born community who had conflicting addresses were told to use provisional ballots when none were available; signs posted in black neighborhoods warned that voter fraud is a crime.
And in one of the few glitches with political overtones, a problem with the calibration of electronic voting machines in Lebanon County, Pa., caused about a half dozen machines to display what voters thought were straight Republican tickets as straight Democratic tickets.
Poll workers alerted the county elections bureau, and voters were able to change their ballots, said Michael Anderson, director of the Lebanon County Bureau of Elections.
Nearly 90 million Americans were expected to vote today, in addition to more than 46 million who voted early or by absentee ballot. Voters were being watched by thousands of federal monitors, voting rights advocates, conservative watchdogs and even international observers looking for anything from dirty tricks to acts of violence.
