Machine Problems Worsened 2008 Voting Woes

The electronic voting problems in the 2008 election are broader than recently-publicized snafus such as machines not turning on, voter databases omitting names, or touch screens not properly recording votes, according to an analysis of 1,700 incident reports from the nation's largest voter hotline.

Moreover, the voting machine issues and the confusion they caused among poll workers appear to have compounded the delays faced by untold thousands of voters this fall, a preliminary analysis of 1-800-OUR-VOTE reports by Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a researcher at Princeton University and the University of California, has found.

"If we can do anything to improve the experience of the average voter facing a machine problem, it should be reduce the amount of time they spend in line," Hall wrote this week, adding that voters who had machine problems and got back-up paper ballots often were not confident that their votes would count.

"Another curious feature of the data is the voters' uniformly negative attitudes toward contingency or back-up plans," he said. "Voters are often upset and mistrustful."

Hall's analysis is one of the first assessments to look at electronic voting in the 2008 fall election. Many voting rights groups have said the biggest problems this year were inaccurate voter registration records, not enough early voting sites, and planning that did not accommodate high turnout. Hall's findings suggest that the voting machinery used exacerbated these very issues.

1700 Incident Reports

During early voting and on Election Day, the Election Protection Coalition, which had a volunteer staff of 10,000 lawyers, received calls via a national hotline, 1-866-OURVOTE. The calls were notated, categorized and posted on OurVoteLive.org. Of 86,000 calls received this fall, about 1,900 -- or 2.2 percent -- were about the machines. Two-thirds were registration and polling place inquiries.

There were 1,700 incidents after eliminating duplicates, Hall said. These calls generally did not involve problems encountered later Tuesday night during the vote count, he said in an e-mail. In contrast, the Democratic National Committee's election protection team monitoring machine issues, including the count, recorded "thousands" of incidents, a volunteer on that team said.

The most common voter hotline complaints were "about broken machinery, long lines, long waits to vote and reports of emergency ballots being used instead of the normal mode of voting," Hall said. "However, there are some interesting features from these reports."

Machine breakdowns and electronic poll book bottlenecks -- where voters check in before voting -- lead to many delays, Hall said. He cited a report from Atlanta where all 15 voting machines in a polling place had stopped working, and a New York City report of one poll book for hundreds of voters. A shortage of e-poll book laptops was reported in Georgia, while in Maryland poll workers could not get their electronic voting systems up and running, he said, citing typical complaints.

One surprise, Hall said, was that the delays in voting did not just come with checking in voters -- but with voters wanting to run their ballots through vote-count scanners. "We have reports of people waiting in line for 3 hours in New Jersey, 3.5 hours in Georgia, 5 hours in Ohio, 6 hours in Missouri," he said. "In many cases, long lines were exacerbated by voters insisting on feeding their own ballot into an optical scan machine, despite it taking a long time to service or replace the affected equipment."

Hall said he was "very encouraged to see that in most cases, emergency ballots were available," though he noted that in Virginia some precincts ran out of back-up ballots. "What I didn't count on was that voters consider voting via an emergency ballot to be fundamentally suspect; that is, most were worried that their vote wouldn't count if cast via emergency ballot."