One Unverifiable Touch-Screen Machine Finally Fixed, No Provisional Ballots Available at Polling Place, Voters Turned Away
UPDATE: Right on Schedule, Officials Blame Pollworkers for Error | FURTHER UPDATE: Vote Flips from Obama to Clinton Reported in NJ as Well...
By John Gideon on 2/5/2008, 6:26am PT  

Blogged on the fly by John Gideon, VotersUnite.Org

The Associated Press is reporting that the two Sequoia AVC Advantage touch-screen voting machines at the Hoboken Fire Department Engine Company No. 2 on Washington Street would not work for about 45 minutes as the polls opened this morning. This polling place just happens to be the location where New Jersey Governor John Corzine votes, or was at least scheduled to at 6:15am. He was unable to cast his vote until 7:00am according to the reports.

AP notes that several voters were turned away this morning until they were able to get one of the machines working. Fox "News" reported earlier that there were no provisional ballots at the poll site, so voters had no choice but to wait for the machines to be fixed or to choose not to vote at all.

Update by Brad Friedman flying in...

New York's ABC 7 confirms the problems. They report: "The big question is why did this polling place not have any provisional ballots," and they note that "lots of people were obviously turned away."

Corzine is just the latest in a growing line of public officials and other well-known personalities who have run into recent trouble voting at the polls.

  • Last week, Rush Limbaugh's touch-screen machine froze up while voting in the Florida Primary.
  • In 2006, Missouri's Sec. of State Robin Carnahan was told three times by a pollworker, in violation of state law, that she would have to produce a drivers license before she would be allowed to vote.
  • In 2005, California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was temporarily barred from casting his vote, as the e-voting system in Santa Monica showed him as having already voted.
  • And, only somewhat related: In early 2006, Ann Coulter knowingly voted at the wrong precinct (a first degree misdemeanor) after knowingly using an incorrect home address, that of her realtor, on her voter registration form in Palm Beach County Florida (a third-degree felony).

FURTHER UPDATE FROM BRAD, 7:45am PT: Right on schedule, officials say pollworkers are to blame for the still-unspecified problem that kept machines from working this morning. As you'll see, it's always "human error", rather than the fault of the crappy machines, or the idiots who created them so poorly or made them so complicated that they continue to fail in election after election. The only "human error", in truth, is that of the Election Officials who irresponsibly chose to use these horrible voting systems in the first place.

STILL FURTHER UPDATE FROM BRAD, 12:15pm PT: One of the "conspiracy theorists" at Daily Kos reports that attempts to vote for Obama flipped to Clinton on the touch-screen voting systems. Further such reports also found in comments there.

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Article Categories: Election Irregularities, Sequoia Voting Systems, New Jersey, Election 2008, Touch-Screen DREs/BMDs