Civil rights groups carefully tracked and loudly decried voting problems across the country Tuesday, but there appeared to be few signs of widespread Election Day difficulties at polling sites.
“We have been witnessing the most unfair, confusing and discriminatory election landscape in almost 50 years,” Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said at a news conference in Washington as voting was underway.
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Henderson asserted that changes to voting laws in more than a dozen states had unleashed “mass confusion” at the polls.
“In state after state, we have seen politicians manipulating the election rules to make it harder for people,” he charged.
A major coalition of “election protection” groups reported more than 18,000 calls to a national toll-free hotline as of about 8 p.m., but there was no immediate indication of how many voters were reporting problems and how many simply had questions about voting procedures or polling locations.
Civil rights organizations complained of long lines in Florida, problems with voting machines in Texas and inaccuracies on voting rolls in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
The Florida Democratic Party went to court in Broward County Tuesday evening in an unsuccessful bid to keep polls open two hours past the scheduled 7 p.m. closing time.
The emergency motion, publicized by Charlie Crist’s campaign for governor, claimed that problems with computer systems delayed the opening of one polling place Tuesday morning and made it difficult for voters to update their address information online. The motion also said that inaccurate information on polling locations was given to some voters.
A judge turned down the Democrats’ request, but voters in line at 7 p.m. were still being allowed to cast ballots, officials said.
Republicans also had complaints about some Election Day problems, including touchscreen voting machines in Virginia that reportedly caused some voters’ preferences to be recorded incorrectly, at least initially. Virginia Republican Party Executive Director Shaun Kenney sent the state’s election department a complaint that voting machines in Virginia Beach and other jurisdictions appeared to be calibrated improperly.
The letter cited a web video that appeared to show a voter attempting to vote for Virginia Beach Republican Rep. Scott Rigell while the machine mistakenly displayed a vote for Democrat Suzanne Patrick.
Voting rights activists also criticized the failure of a Georgia state website that allows voters to look up their polling place and verify voter registration data.
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“For the website to crash because it didn’t have sufficient bandwidth, that is a failure of the secretary of state,” said Barbara Arnwine of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The voters of Georgia deserve better than what they got today.”
A spokesman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp acknowledged that the “my voter” page on the office’s website was not working correctly early Tuesday but said the problem was quickly corrected.
“That was only available intermittently for a few hours this morning, but it was restored at 10:30 a.m. and has worked fine the rest of the day,” spokesman Jared Thomas said.
“It was a just a technical issue that was resolved,” Thomas said. “It’s working fine now.”
Civil rights groups were already at odds with Georgia officials after failing to persuade a court there to force local officials to process as many as 40,000 voter registrations activists say were never properly recorded.
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In Texas, a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Nandita Berry said voting was generally going smoothly. The Lone Star State recently persuaded a federal appeals court to overturn a judge’s order blocking a new voter ID law, considered the strictest in the nation.
“Overall, things seems to be going well,” spokeswoman Alicia Pierce said. ”Texans are showing up at the polls ready to vote.”
Pierce said she was unaware of reports of problems with voting machines in Harris County cited by civil rights activists. Local press reports said a machine malfunctioned at one polling place, causing lines to form.
Rev. Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus, who also participated in Tuesday’s press conference, complained of efforts to discourage students from voting, particularly at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. He said an early voting location on campus was closed and students were told to visit a “night club off campus” and later an inconvenient government office.
“They’ve been misleading students,” Yearwood said, adding that lines Tuesday were “extra long.”
The main grievance of most of the activists who spoke at the D.C. press conference appeared to be with recent legal setbacks in the courts and in state legislatures concerning voting rights, rather than voters’ experience Tuesday.
In particular, they inveighed against the Supreme Court’s ruling last year striking down a provision in the Voting Rights Act that required many states and localities to get advance approval from the federal government for changes to election laws and in some cases polling locations.
“This is the first election in 50 years where voters of color will not have the full protections needed to vote,” said Deborah Vagins of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Congress must also pass new and stronger protections.”
Article source: http://www.freep.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/20/nbc-chris-christie-bridge-scandal/15950527/
Civil rights groups carefully tracked and loudly decried voting problems across the country Tuesday, but there appeared to be few signs of widespread Election Day difficulties at polling sites.“We have been witnessing the most unfair, confusing and discriminatory election landscape in a...
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