Voter turnout swamps polling sites in battleground states
Voters in Florida, Ohio and Virginia, key to the election, are among those reporting long lines and problems with ballots and voting machines. Voting-rights groups sound the alarm.
Reporting from Miami and Washington — Heavy voter turnout overwhelmed polling places in the key battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia, prompting tens of thousands of complaints about long waits, missing ballots and malfunctioning voting machines.
Most trouble spots had been identified ahead of the voting by the Election Protection Coalition, a vote-monitoring cooperative uniting dozens of nonpartisan civil-rights and public- policy groups.
The coalition reported more than 41,000 calls to its (866) OUR-VOTE hotline by midday, including 1,400 from Florida and more than 1,000 from Ohio.
It was unclear if the problems reported so far were indications of broader breakdowns. But voting-rights groups were already sounding the alarm.
"We certainly don't want to be Chicken Little here. We're trying to report what we're seeing out in the field. But this is what we expected to happen," Jonah Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections, said of the problems that surfaced in previous elections or early voting. "The infrastructure of our election isn't really equipped to handle this kind of turnout."
In North Carolina, where extended early voting allowed half of registered voters to cast their ballots ahead of election day, lines were more manageable and problems fewer, Goldman said.
Voters in Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio faced waits of up to four hours, according to the coalition.
Widespread breakdowns of electronic voting machines and jamming of optical scanners for paper ballots were reported throughout Florida.
"Ballots are being set aside to be run through the scanners at end of the day, which doesn't allow the voter to verify that the ballot was marked as intended," said Derek Cressman of Common Cause. "We've seen dozens of reports of this all across South Florida. It doesn't appear to be an isolated issue."
Misprinted ballots in Broward County caused delay at some polling places, and election workers in Tampa, Tallahassee, Palm Beach and Miami were having trouble calling in to the state supervisor of elections to verify eligibility of voters whose names were among more than 10,000 still being contested under Florida's "no match, no vote" law adopted last year.
Election watchdogs chastised states where the potential for turnout-related problems had been forecast had done too little to avert a shortage of voting machines, ballots and poll workers.
