Over 150 Georgia citizens volunteered as poll watchers in the Tuesday primary. They observed machine malfunctions and insecure election administration procedures. Here are excerpts from one observer's report.*

When the polls opened ...

The calls from the poll watchers began promptly at 7:00 AM with every irregularity, improper behavior and machine malfunction they saw reported to the attorneys.

One precinct reported almost upon opening of the polls that all machines (10) were failing. Voters inserted the access card and the card was immediately ejected. The pollwatcher reported that voters were offered provisional paper ballots, but they were prepared with only 25 of these ballots and ran out within 10 minutes. It took almost 2 hours to rectify the situation even though our HQ personnel reported it to the County office immediately.

... The end result of the negotiations with the attorneys was that we would not be granted access until the polls closed at 7:00 PM so we returned to our HQ location.

We arrived at the polling place and asked to speak to the Poll Manager who explained that they were experiencing some problems but they had a technician on the way.

Our Pollwatcher had asked the technician to note the problems on his forms. He signed his name, wrote in the time (1:00 PM) and noted "All machines running hot."

We spoke with the technician and he explained that the machines were behaving erratically. Because of the heat, when a voter placed their hand on the touchscreen, their chosen candidate would change (the red X would jump all over the screen) and voters would have great difficulty casting their vote for the candidate of their choosing. He informed us the problem began occurring at 12:15 and was getting progressively worse as the environment in the polling place was heating up with the daytime heating.

Voting continued on the overheated machines until the polls closed at 7:00 PM.

As poll workers bring the reports and PCMCIA [memory] cards back to election center:

1. HQ Poll workers receive the envelopes, checking the seal.
...
4. At no time during this process does any HQ poll worker check, monitor or verify the serial numbers or any other identifying information on the PCMCIA cards.

5. HQ Poll workers return to the envelopes and check off that it contains "tapes." The tapes are not removed from the envelope, they are not read, they are not documented and the envelope is dumped into a bin with other envelopes. These "tapes" contain the Zero Total Report and the End of Day Precinct Totals.