Feisty Aphrodite Archives
Voting problems already plague elections well before results tallied
It is 10:00 pm and voters are still waiting in line three hours after the polls closed. Here in Denver today, voters waited in line for hours after a long day plagued by problems throughout the entire county. With the results still being tallied, it is not too soon to call that the electronic voting machines caused nothing less than many headaches in the Democratic hub of the state. Standing in line today, the voting machines went down twice in just the short time I was there - the first time just being at our polling place on the Auraria campus, the second resulting from a complete shutdown of all the voting machines in Denver County. Many voters were first told to leave and come back later by polling officials, then were encouraged to stay after learning that the entire city was down. I called the hotline of the Election Protection Coalition and notified them of the problems as they were announced to us in the swelling lines.
In the event of a voting machine malfunction, I was told that it was the legal duty for the polling place to supply provisional or paper ballots, and when I asked the operations manager if there were any available the response I received was, "Not at this time." However, when the line then came around I happened to see a three-inch stack of provisional ballots sitting alone on a desk. This was our first failure. Many people began to grow uneasy with the malfunctions of the machines and the confusion of those running the polls. We asked if the voting deadline would be extended, and once again the empty response, "I don't know" was parroted. These were not the only inconsistencies facing Denver voters today, as friends related that at other polling places, the machines would freeze in the middle of a vote being cast and the voter would be turned away without a second chance to make up the lost ballot. The Colorado Convention Center had the old lever machines along with the electronic ballots, yet when the electronic machines went down, it was only after a team of lawyers were called in to force the officials to open the paper machines to the public so voting could resume. At another location, a line of 175 people waited in line for at least ninety minutes while polling officials only utilized five of the twenty machines at the Washington Park location. The other fifteen machines remained vacant without any explanation. While problems are being reported all over the country, this was just a glimpse acquired from first-hand experience during the election here in Colorado that I and many other people encountered just during our time at the polls, yet the local media has only mentioned the lines as the primary problems while completely negating the machine malfunctions and official incompetency thus far in their broadcast. What does this example say about the democratic model we are exporting to other countries? To be continued...
