Election commission: Voting problems widespread

By THOMAS HARGROVE
Scripps Howard News Service
November 23, 2004

WASHINGTON - Mountainous stacks of unopened absentee ballots cluttered South Florida election centers. Sixty-year-old voting machines jammed, forcing New Yorkers to stand in lines three blocks long. Punch-card machines went unused in Ohio because poll workers didn't know how to plug them in.

The four members of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission met Tuesday to compare horror stories while acting as federal observers in the Nov. 2 election. America is lucky that President Bush was re-elected by a 3 million-vote margin, they said, or the nation would again be wracked by election uncertainty.

"The margin was enough that the glitches were not important," concluded commission Chairman DeForest Soaries. "The bad news is, we still don't live up to the expectations that democracy demands."

The four commissioners fanned out around the country three weeks ago to watch a record 119 million Americans try to cast ballots in the presidential election. The most traveled commissioner was Paul DeGregorio, who went to New Jersey, New York, Illinois and Missouri on Election Day.

"I went to the largest polling place in the world, Co-op City in the Bronx, where there are 14,000 people registered," DeGregorio said. "It was pretty orderly for the most part. They used the old lever machines built in the 1940s and those machines did jam."

All four commissioners said they saw unacceptably long lines.

"The line at the polling place nearest the (site of the former) World Trade Center was three blocks long. The problem was some machines jammed within just a few minutes," DeGregorio said.

Emergency workers were summoned to keep order at Laclede Elementary School in St. Louis when DeGregorio arrived at 6 p.m. "There were 200 people who had been waiting 2-1/2 hours. There weren't enough poll workers and there was only one (voter registration) book containing names A through Z," he said.

The additional county employees ripped the registration book into three parts to process voters quicker.

Commissioner Ray Martinez spent the day observing 10 polling sites in Cleveland, where he "generally saw very dedicated poll workers and very patient voters." But police were summoned to one polling place where voters had been waiting for at least two hours.

"There was a great deal of confusion and the voters were becoming upset," Martinez said. "I saw six or seven voting stations in the corner that weren't set up for use. The precinct official said she thought each machine had to be plugged in separately. She didn't know that they could be plugged together," he said.

Martinez, legally required not to interfere in a local election, used his cell phone to call Cuyahoga County authorities to tell precinct officials that the machines could be set up together.

Soaries spent Election Day in Florida, where state officials had eliminated all of the punch-card voting machines that caused havoc in 2000. "Many people who were looking for Florida to be another Florida were disappointed," he said.

But Floridians suffered considerable disputes over early-voting procedures in Volusia County and absentee-voting problems in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

"By the time I got to Miami, there were about 50,000 absentee ballots that had yet to be opened and more absentee ballots were arriving (in the mail) that day," Soaries said. "There were only three machines available to tabulate the absentee ballots. They may still be counting absentees in Miami to this day."

The only commissioner who did not report Election Day horror stories was Vice Chairman Gracia Hillman, who observed voting in Los Angeles. But there were delays of up to three hours. "There is a question of what is a reasonable length of time for people to stand in line to vote," she said.

The commissioners agreed to hold a series of three public hearings next year to establish testing standards for voting machines, to consider statewide voter-registration standards and to review the often-inconsistent use of new provisional balloting for voters who say they are eligible but don't appear on local registration lists.