Glitches, lines hamper early voting
By John Murawski
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 19

Long lines and technical glitches hampered the county's early polling places Tuesday, the second day of early voting leading up to the Nov. 2 presidential election.

At Palm Beach County's West Boca branch library, voters were turned away Tuesday morning after touch-screen voting machines failed to work properly. Voting finally got underway at midday, after five new units were delivered.

Lines snaked out from the library's small windowless conference room, which doubled as a makeshift precinct. Waits of two or three hours were not uncommon at many of the county's eight early voting sites.

Mostly elderly residents sat on library chairs and traded quips about the third-world voting system. Some cursed county elections supervisor Theresa LePore, a lame duck who had been blamed for the infamous "butterfly ballot" of 2000 and was voted out of office in August.

At the public library, South Palm Beach County's impatient gerontocracy turned its ire on precinct supervisor Etty Hakim. Surrounded by clamoring retirees and housewives and people who took time off work, Hakim waved people away and hid in the conference room without offering explanations.

"No comment, have a nice day," she told a group gathered at her door that included State Rep. Irv Slosberg, D-Boca Raton. When voting finally got underway, Hakim said "Everything is hunky dory" and instructed people in line to keep quiet "because this is a library."

Seeing all this, Jane Weidman of Boca Raton said she had lost confidence in the system.

"We are all here because we're afraid our vote is not going to count on Nov. 2," she said. "We can't vote. It's like Afghanistan. We're all in a long line. What's going on here?"

No one seemed to know for sure why the delay Tuesday. Would-be voters traded speculations and a disagreed among themselves on the cause of the wait. The lack of official information turned everyone into an expert.

Democratic poll watcher Rhoda Stern-Moss cleared up the mystery.

"They tried to boot up the machines this morning and they wouldn't go, so they ordered new ones," she said. "No big deal."

It was a big deal if you had waited a total of five hours in line Monday and left without voting, then spent three more hours in line Tuesday — Boca Raton resident Ann Dean's complaint.

Morris Jay of Boca Raton came Monday but left without voting. He was one of the first in line Tuesday and was not inspired by his voting experience.

"I voted, but my machine froze," he said. "They fiddled around with it, then they closed it up. They gave me another card and I went to another machine."