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Volume 72, Issue 57,
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
News Trouble with electronic voting spurs several inquiries by Chlesea Adams
Nationwide problems at the polls were reported throughout Tuesday, including long lines and lost votes due to glitches with electronic voting machines. Fort Bend County voters in District 22, a hotly contested House seat between Nick Lampson and write-in candidate Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, may have been prevented from voting on local referendums because the wrong machine was delivered to their precinct, the Houston Chronicle reported. According to the secretary of state, Sekula-Gibbs received more early votes in the special election than her write-in opponents. Other reported problems in Fort Bend and Harris counties include an improperly installed phone bank that did not work most of the morning. There was also a shortage of electronic voting machines, which created long lines at many precincts. Tech support was slow to respond and fix problems with machines. "If voters were disenfranchised," Mike Malaise, campaign manager for Lampson, said. "We will definitely not let that stand." A plethora of voting irregularities in Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, Indiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio and Florida led to federal orders in some precincts to keep polls open several hours late, CNN reported. Poll workers in Florida could not get some of the machines to start and voters had to wait for an hour or more. Digital hiccups aren't the only problems voters encountered, according to Mike Sheehan, a reporter for liberal news blog The Raw Story, who says a Republican "dirty tricks campaign" employed misleading, automatically generated calls meant to confuse voters about party affiliations of the candidates. The FBI is investigating the allegations and is also involved in the Virginia Senate race between incumbent Republican George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb after some voters reported getting calls that encouraged them to stay home or directed them to the wrong polling places, according to the Washington Post. More FBI investigations are under way in Indiana, where a Democratic volunteer in Bloomington was found with unprocessed absentee ballots after counting had begun, and in Arizona where three men, one with a weapon, stopped and questioned Hispanic voters outside a Tucson polling place, the Post reported. More than 80 percent of ballots cast this election were made or calculated electronically, and 40 percent of voters were using electronic voting machines for the first time. Send comments to dcnews@mail.uh.edu |
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