Have You Voted, Any Problems?

[frankfrank]

I ran into no queue when I voted yesterday...and they immediately handed me a PAPER ballot! I felt greatly relieved when I saw that. Voting was not difficult at all.

I was glad to see no major problems posted either here, or in a similar thread that I started Monday night (late). It appears that there weren't any epidemics of big voting problems in the U.S. after all. I had expected this election cycle to be "like 2004 Ohio on steroids."

Could it be that Diebold, et. al., realized there were enough people WATCHING for problems, that they'd better NOT hack the vote? Senate races in Virginia, Missouri, Montana and perhaps Maryland could have been hacked so easily. I don't know the status of electronic-machine voting in those states.

If massive vote-manipulation and hacking had become evident, could it have caused such a wave of activism that electronic machines would be discouraged or eliminated in the USA? Perhaps these voting-machine companies feared that their very livelihoods could be threatened (though I believe Diebold has a product line with much more than voting machines).

 

[epicAdam]

I voted, didn't have any problems.

I did hear from my friends who voted at the on-campus polling place. There weren't enough machines to handle the turnout (there were three voting machines, but only one computer that verified voter registration). Students were standing in line for upwards of 3 hours. The poll workers told everybody in line that they'd have a chance to vote, but failed to consider that that the student union building, where the polls were located, was going to close at midnight, which means everybody had to be out.

So they started to let people vote on provisional (paper) ballots, but they ran out of enough to cover everybody in line. A bunch of students did not vote because they didn't want to stand in line for who knows how long and those who did wait were completely disenfranchised. I would blame the election committee but I don't think anybody expected that students would actually WANT to vote this time around!