Voting Tech Snafus Pop Up Early, But How Often?

Columbus, Ohio's voting machines were so bad, they managed also to take down the county's phone system under the crush of calls that resulted.

Denver has wait times of up to two hours to vote, thanks to machines that are down and new voter identification rules.

Ohio Congresswoman Jean Schmidt couldn't get her ballot read by the optical scanner, while in the infamous Cuyahoga County, the AP reports that at least one voter says he was purged from the voting rolls, despite voting in the primaries.

MSNBC has the best roundup so far, but this is a story happening in every precinct in the country so it's hard to know exactly what's happening.

With a third of Americans voting on new equipment and voters navigating new registration databases and changing ID rules, election watchdogs worried about polling problems even before the voting began.

“This is largely what I expected,” said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a nonpartisan group that tracks voting changes. “With as much change as we had, expecting things to go absolutely smoothly at the beginning of the day is too optimistic. Every problem is one problem too many, but some problems are always to be expected on election days.”

It's not clear if these are just simple aberrations to be expected in putting together a massive operation every two years or so, or whether the world's leading democracy still can't figure out how to vote?

Then again if voting were really thought to be that important, wouldn't it be a national holiday like it is say in Taiwan, a country that had its first real presidential election in 1996?

27B would love to hear how your voting tech day went. Drop a note in the comments or email me at 27bstroke6 insert the ad sign here ryansingel.net.

PhotoL hyku