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Voters Persevere Despite Ballot Shortages, Lines
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County officials fielded complaints from irate voters. "We're getting people jumping up and down who are very angry at us and don't think we know what we're doing," said Allen Harrison, chairman of the Arlington County Electoral Board.
In the District, scattered reports of ballot shortages and malfunctioning ballot-reading machines began early and continued into the evening. Bill O'Field, spokesman for the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, said voter turnout was high compared with past presidential primaries, leading to a ballot shortage. The District is one of the few area jurisdictions that uses scanners to read paper ballots.
O'Field said some scanners jammed after clerks failed to properly tear the stubs before feeding ballots into the machines. Scanners broke down twice at Stuart-Hobson Middle School in Capitol Hill, and an auxiliary bin overflowed with ballots that had been cast but not processed. At one point, poll workers stacked cast ballots on top of a piano.
David Pardo, a volunteer poll watcher for the Obama campaign, said: "There's no hint of any wrongdoing. It's just chaos."
At Watkins Elementary School in Capitol Hill, election workers ran out of ballots three times. "We just didn't know we'd have this many people," polling captain Mary Miller said.
District officials struggled to report election results. O'Field said the weather was partly to blame. Council member Jack Evans (D-Ward 2) pronounced the slow pace of returns "very disappointing." Of the ballot shortages, neighborhood commissioner Lenwood Johnson said, "Somebody needs to be fired over that."
Most of the region's other jurisdictions rely on touch-screen voting machines, similar to an automated teller machine, and they appeared to work well yesterday. In the District, the touch screens are available as an alternative to the paper and scanner system.
In Montgomery County, where extensive machine malfunctions occurred in the 2006 primary, Kenneth McDowell, an Internet consultant, tried to vote in Bethesda. The electronic voter check-in system at his polling place said, incorrectly, that he had already voted. McDowell, who was given a provisional paper, appeared to be among an unlucky few.
