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Los Angeles TimesHeavy voter turnout overwhelmed polling places in the key battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia, prompting tens of thousands of complaints about long waits, missing ballots and malfunctioning voting machines.
Most trouble spots had been identified ahead of the voting by the Election Protection Coalition, a vote-monitoring cooperative uniting dozens of nonpartisan civil-rights and public- policy groups. The coalition reported more than 41,000 calls to its (866) OUR-VOTE hotline by midday, including 1,400 from Florida and more than 1,000 from Ohio. It was unclear if the problems reported so far were indications of broader breakdowns. But voting-rights groups were already sounding the alarm....
Voters in Virginia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio faced waits of up to four hours, according to the coalition.
Widespread breakdowns of electronic voting machines and jamming of optical scanners for paper ballots were reported throughout Florida. "Ballots are being set aside to be run through the scanners at end of the day, which doesn't allow the voter to verify that the ballot was marked as intended," said Derek Cressman of Common Cause. "We've seen dozens of reports of this all across South Florida. It doesn't appear to be an isolated issue."
Misprinted ballots in Broward County caused delay at some polling places, and election workers in Tampa, Tallahassee, Palm Beach and Miami were having trouble calling in to the state supervisor of elections to verify eligibility of voters whose names were among more than 10,000 still being contested under Florida's "no match, no vote" law adopted last year....
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In addition to machine problems in Philadelphia, election monitors across Pennsylvania reported at midday that students at Penn State University and elsewhere were being forced to vote on provisional ballots. Voting-rights groups worry that provisional ballots may not get counted because they are not tabulated until days after election day....
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-votingproblems5-2008nov05,0,730388.story