Not Quite a Blog

Looks like voting glitches do not discriminate (from "Schwarzenegger Hits Snag at Polling Place"):

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed up to his Brentwood neighborhood polling station today to cast his ballot in the special election — and was told he had already voted.

Elections officials said a Los Angeles County poll worker had entered Schwarzenegger's name into an electronic voting touch screen station in Pasadena on Oct. 25. The worker, who was not identified, was testing the voting machine in preparation for early voting that began the next day.

How many other people might this affect? How many people were entered in as test votes and then mistakenly marked as having voted?

Other voting problems

I'll list other voting problems under the fold (largely courtesy of John Gideon of VotersUnite!):

Follow up:

In Fulton County, GA ("Voting problems in East Point, Fulton sites"):

Fulton elections chief Cynthia Welch said the machines at Tri-Cities High School "were not calibrated," forcing poll workers to switch to a provisional, paper ballot. [...]

The touch-screen machines were properly calibrated and back on line by 10 a.m., Welch said. [...] Welch said similar problems had been reported in at least four other polling places in Fulton County by late-morning, but she didn't know which specific precincts were affected. A power interruption in one of the10 machines at the Riverwood precinct in Sandy Springs caused a brief problem, according to Ruth Sours, the poll manager at the Riverwood.

Also, see "Voting Problem Plagues Sandy Springs Polling Place"

In Roanoke County, VA "Voters report problems with voting machines in Roanoke Co.:

News 7 has received calls from several voters in at least four different precincts who say their votes for Tim Kaine were not recorded or took several attempts to go through.

They contend the electronic touch screens repeatedly indicated they were voting for Republican candidate Jerry Kilgore instead of registering their intended vote for his Democratic opponent Tim Kaine.

In various counties in Ohio. In Montgomery County "Technical difficulties with voting machines"

Sporadic problems were reported throughout Montgomery County, including Miamisburg, Washington Twp. and Dayton. Mike Petkus, 47, of Dayton said that when he went to cast his ballot at Kiser Middle School in north Dayton, he had the Northridge school board candidates on his touch screen rather than the Dayton school board.

He thought, ‘I don’t have time to play games but this isn’t right,’ ” he said. As he was leaving the polling place to get to work, he said, “another guy was raising that same red flag.” “I think there was some very poor checking,” he said. Montgomery County Board of Elections Director Steve Harsman acknowledged there were some expected and unexpected problems, though he was pleased overall with the way things were running. [...]

His office received 30 to 40 calls from precincts reporting a “low paper error” on some of the machines even though each contained a new roll of paper.

Harsman believes the machines got jostled while moved to the polling locations, shaking a bracket and causing a sensor to go off.

Voters should have been able to use other machines while roving troubleshooters remedied the problem, he said. Harsman said there were also some scattered reports of poll workers who were not able to properly insert the memory cards into the machines.

At one Washington Twp. precinct, two of the eight voting machines were reportedly taken out of service in the morning because of snafus.

In Miamisburg, a voter who went to cast his ballot at a precinct in the Miamisburg library at 7 a.m. said he wasn’t able to vote because the new machines were displaying ballots for a Warren County precinct.

He said poll operators told him they had to cancel all the ballots of people who had tried to vote there earlier because they all said the wrong ballots were displayed.

In Canton, OH ("Problems setting up equipment delay polling sites"):

Some poll workers panicked when it came time to assemble the machines in front of waiting voters, and machines didn’t work properly, he said.

There also were poll workers who failed to offer voters paper ballots when the machines weren’t working, Matthews said.

“That’s stressed in their training. For some reason they didn’t take advantage of it,” he said.

Operations were normal by mid-morning. The elections board had 42 workers — some from Diebold and some from the board staff — running routes to polling stations. Those workers made certain machines were assembled correctly.

Also see, "New voting machines cause late starts at some precincts".

In Rochester, NY ("Voting machine removed; votes in question"):

Republican Commissioner Michael Northrup said a machine located at the Victor Fire Hall was removed and replaced this morning because the name of Heather Zollo, the Democratic candidate for Victor Town Supervisor, was listed under the position for town clerk. The line where her name should have been was blank. The candidate listing apparently had shifted.

"I am not jumping to conclusions," Northrup said. "It's a piece of paper and could have been knocked over by accident."

Forty-two votes were cast on the machine before it was replaced this morning. Northrup said for now the votes will count. But the incident is under investigation and that could change.