The Voting News Daily: Vote flipping in Indiana, Maryland, Penn. 10,000 calls to 866OURVOTE
866-OUR-VOTE received over 10,000 calls today. Top states include California, Georgia &Pennsylvania. Some in today’s news. Would you believe Alabama didn’t have enough pens, so used pencils to mark ballots, causing probs? ..Maryland Diebold touchscreens flip votes from GOP to DEM!..California awaits millions of mail ballots..Various probs with epoll books, paper poll books, power outages, locked up ballots, polling place moves, voting machine shutdowns, vote flipping, missing contests, bi-partisan tricks, voter registration problems.. poll locations…
All this and lots more in today’s very big voting news….
AL: Pencils causing problems for some voters *(voting w/pencil, pens hard to find?)
http://annistonstar.com/view/full_story/10135701/article-Pencils-causing-problems-for-some-voters?instance=top_center_featured
Regular voters in previous Alabama elections may have noticed a change at the polls today, as election workers handed out pencils to complete ballots instead of the familiar black pens.
Calhoun County Probate Judge Alice Martin, the county’s chief election official, said the pencils have caused some problems here and elsewhere in the state. Voters who bear down too hard with the pencils in some cases are leaving an impression on the other side of their ballots, causing the machines that read them to reject the ballots.
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Representatives of the company that provides election equipment and services to nearly every Alabama county said the change was made because it was becoming increasingly difficult to find enough pens.
AZ: #10720 Nov. 2 2010 / 2:40p.m. ET Tucson, Pima, AZ
http://www.ourvotelive.org/report/10720 darcyelgin Precinct: 82 2010 General Election, Polling place problem: Volunteer reported 4 polling sites within a mile. People who live in the same household are all given different sites to vote and voters seem generally confused about where they are supposed to be.
CA: Glitch Shuts Down Coto de Caza Voting Machines for Two Hours
http://voiceofoc.org/politics/article_60bde12c-e6c5-11df-b0ea-001cc4c03286.
Voters at the Coto de Caza fire station had to use paper ballots early today when glitches shut down all 12 voting machines for about two hours, poll workers said
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“We had to use paper ballots,” she said…
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Poll workers said today was the first time all machines at the fire station were knocked out. They blamed a faulty main connection that only took a few minutes to fix once the repairman arrived.
CA: Millions of California vote-by-mail ballots unreturned
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_16499667 The state’s 58 counties had reported receiving just under 3 million absentee ballots as of early afternoon Monday — less than 40 percent of the 7.6 million ballots requested statewide for the general election, according to the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials.
CA: Santa Clara election workers use erasers to clean mail ballots*
http://www.news10.net/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=103841&catid=2
An ink smudge on Santa Clara County ballots caused a mechanical glitch at the county elections office last week, forcing officials to reprocess mail-in ballots and re-inspect ballots being sent to polling precincts for Tuesday’s election.
About one in six of the first 100,000 vote-by-mail ballots processed were incorrectly flagged by an “optical character reader” as ballots containing write-in candidates, county officials said.
The error was the result of the smudge, which was caused by toner used by the company that printed the ballots, elections officials said.