Thanks to a range of causes, election officials in a number of states have begun reporting problems and other issues with voting and vote-tallying machines as lines at polling stations that are much longer than they they normally are during midterm elections are forming across the country.
In South Carolina, for example, voters have alerted officials that machines were actually selecting the opposite candidates they were trying to choose, The Hill reports.
According to a local CBS affiliate, several voters complained that the choices in several contests including the governor’s race were being changed to a party they had not selected. Voters noticed the changes when they reviewed the electronic voting machine’s confirmation page before actually submitting their ballot. One said she tried several times to make choices and selections she preferred but the machine would not accept her ballots as cast so she was moved to a different machine. It wasn't clear if voting officials took her machine offline. Also, it's not clear how many voters are similarly submitting their ballots without checking to make sure their choices are correct.
In North Carolina, meanwhile, some polling places reported that there are issues with voters trying to feed paper ballots into counting machines, which officials blamed on high levels of humidity.
“When ballots cannot be read by tabulators, they are stored securely in ‘emergency bins’ and will be tabulated as soon as possible,” according to the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which issued a statement Tuesday, the Washington Examiner reported. Most of the problems were reported in Wake County, the news site noted.
In Georgia, where the race for governor between Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican, and Democratic challenger Stacy Abrams has narrowed in recent weeks, election officials are looking into a series of voting machine technical glitches at a number of polling stations in Gwinett County, the New York Daily News reports.
The state has been embroiled in two election controversies. On Monday, Kemp announced that election officials had opened an investigation into the state Democratic Party for allegedly attempting to hack voter registration rolls. The secretary of state’s office has also alerted the FBI and Homeland Security.
Also, Georgia Democrats won a victory in federal court last week over the state’s “exact match” law, which requires voter ID to match voting records on file exactly. About 50,000 people had been identified under the system as potential illegal voters but the judge ordered that most of them be permitted to cast ballots. (Related: If illegal aliens weren’t counted in the U.S. census, Democrats would lose dozens of House seats.)
‘Don’t go making a fool of yourself’
The Houston Chronicle reports that in Texas, there are very long lines at several polling places around the state so it is taking longer than normal for many to cast ballots. Also, there are problems with barcode readers and other balloting technology, the paper noted:
Lacy Johnson tried to cast her ballot but a mistake by poll workers made it impossible.
Johnson handed her driver’s license to poll workers to get checked in. They printed out a bar code, which when scanned, would produce an access code she could use to cast her ballot.
But the bar code didn't scan. And the first poll worker had already moved away from the check-in screen, so the system showed that she had already voted. Her only option was to cast a provisional ballot at that point.
In Arizona, AZ Central reported that a foreclosure on a polling station along with “malfunctioning ballot printers” and long voting lines have all complicated efforts to cast ballots in today’s midterms.
Five polling places in Maricopa County — which encompasses Phoenix — were not ready to go when they were supposed to open at 6 a.m. Others ran out of ballots because of printer problems.
And one polling place in Pennsylvania appeared to be in blatant violation of state laws against electioneering and vote tampering. A sign appeared on the door that read, “Vote Straight Democrat,” The Gateway Pundit reported. When one person complained to polling officials about the sign, they were allegedly told “don’t go making a fool of yourself.”
Read more about Democrat vote fraud at VoteFraud.news.
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