Turnout High, but Some Polling Place Issues in Philadelphia

Posted by Steven Rosenfeld at 11:00 AM on November 4, 2008.

Election Day started with heavy turnout in Philadelphia, where polling places quickly saw lines build and the biggest problems were new voters whose names were not on precinct lists and electronic voting machines that did not not work at the day's start.

The voter registration issues appeared to be more widespread, as election protection officials from the Obama campaign and the non-partisan "Committee of 70," a local watch group, noted that many people who had received voter registration cards in the mail were not listed on their precinct voter rolls.

Calls by those election protection officials to the city's Board of Election revealed that those voters' names were on the city's central voter list, which should entitle them to vote with a regular ballot. However, the BOE's instructions to precinct judges, according to these poll watchers, was that anybody who was not on precinct lists should be given a provisional ballot. Those ballots must be verified after Election Day before being counted.

The impact of this voter list snafu -- explained by one ward committeeman as a paperwork backlog by election administrators in this Democrat-controlled city -- is hard to gauge. At several polling places, the estimate was that perhaps as much as 5 percent of the voters were receiving provisional ballots.

If the vote count is close in Pennsylvania tonight, the use of provisional ballots in Philadelphia could slightly cut into Obama's statewide total -- because the city has that many Democratic voters.

"We live in a computer world, but we are not that fast," said Elmer Nardini, a Republican Committeeman from the 26th Ward. "With this election, because of the number of people, there will be problems... To expect it is one thing. To move on it is something else."

As for voting machine issues, a few precincts in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saw the machines fail to work at the start of voting. Each voting machine is expected to accommodate as many as 500 or more voters.

However, in the precincts observed by AlterNet, the biggest bottleneck was checking in voters. There were precincts with lines of 50 or people as voting machines sat idle. The state has a short ballot this year, so it only takes a minute or so to vote.