Editorials: Ending voter suppression ahead of 2016 | Benjamin Jealous/MSNBC

For far too many Americans, voting became more difficult or, in some cases, impossible in 2014. In Texas, Imani Clark, a Black state college student and client of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the lawsuit that declared Texas’s strict voter ID law unconstitutional, was unable to vote with her student ID as she had in the past. Thousands of other students like Imani were also disenfranchised. In Alabama, a 92-year-old great-grandmother was disfranchised by the secretary of state’s last-minute determination that a photo ID issued by public housing authorities is not acceptable ID for voting. She had previously voted with a utility bill. These were familiar stories in each of the 14 states with restrictive voting laws that took effect for the first time during this election season. The new laws include strict photo ID requirements, significant reductions to early voting, limits on same-day registration, and more. All had two things in common: They were reactionary responses to changing demographics and had a disproportionate impact on communities of color. If it were not for the U.S. Supreme Court’s devastating June 2013 decision in Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, many of these changes likely would have been blocked by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Indeed, Texas’s photo ID measure was previously blocked from going into effect for the 2012 elections by Section 5.

Alabama: Justices to hear Alabama redistricting case | Montgomery Advertiser

Alabama’s complicated history of race and politics will be Exhibit A when the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments Wednesday in a case that could change how state lawmakers decide legislative boundaries. The justices will hear 70 minutes of argument about whether the Republicans in charge of Alabama’s legislature relied too heavily on race when they redrew state legislative maps after the 2010 census. Black Democrats allege that the GOP, which gained control of the legislature in the 2010 elections for the first time in more than a century, intentionally packed more black voters into already majority-black districts in order to make the other districts more friendly for Republicans.

Arizona: Barber-McSally Count Resumes Monday Under Legal Cloud | Arizona Public Media

Ron Barber and Martha McSally may find out Monday which of them will represent Arizona’s 2nd Congressional District in the next Congress. Outcome of the too-close-to-call race will hinge on two factors: Pima County completing its count of early, duplicate and provisional ballots; whether the Republican McSally pursues a legal challenge that her lawyer brought up Sunday. The count, including several hundred votes posted Sunday, showed McSally with a 341-vote lead, or 0.16 percent. An estimated 9,000 Pima County provisional ballots and an unknown but likely much smaller number of ballots in Cochise County remained to be counted. Pima County officials were processing provisional and duplicate ballots all weekend and said they will count the ballots Monday with results expected in the afternoon. That could complete the count leading to declaration of a winner. That is, unless McSally’s campaign pursues a legal challenge it raised over provisional ballots Sunday.

Connecticut: Early voting amendment fails | Yale Daily News

Connecticut elected a Democratic governor this year, but Tuesday was a bittersweet night for many state Democrats as Question 1, also known as the Early Voting Amendment, failed at the polls. The amendment, which garnered only 47.5 percent of the vote, would have allowed the General Assembly to expand access to absentee ballots and eliminate most restrictions on early voting in the state. Connecticut is currently one of only 13 states not to allow any form of early voting, whether by mail or in person. Throughout the country, early voting has often proved a partisan issue. Democrats tend to gain from early voting, as demographics more likely to lean Democratic are typically the beneficiaries of early voting. The amendment’s failure in the Nutmeg State did not come as a complete shock to many Connecticut residents and Yale students. Mila Rostain ’17, a member of the Yale College Democrats who had been involved with the push for the amendment, said she was not surprised by its defeat. “The people whom it helps are exactly the people who don’t come out in the midterm elections,” Mila said. The amendment would largely aid ethnic minorities and those with low incomes, for whom voting is typically more difficult, she said, but those groups tend not to vote en masse in midterm elections.

Kansas: Federal appeals court rejects citizenship proof rule for Kansas voters | The Kansas City Star

A federal appeals court on Friday handed a significant setback to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s efforts to require all new and re-registering voters to provide a document proving citizenship. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled that Kansas cannot require proof-of-citizenship documents — almost always a birth certificate or passport — from prospective voters who register using a federal voter registration form. The court also said that a federal agency doesn’t have to alter the form to fit Kansas requirements. Arizona has a similar proof-of-citzenship requirement, and Kobach argued the case on behalf of both states in conjunction with Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett. The Kansas requirement is separate from a section of state law requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls.

New Hampshire: Nineteen recounts requested, process to begin next week | Concord Monitor

Nineteen New Hampshire races could have different outcomes than were announced following Tuesday’s election. The recount process for the requests filed by yesterday’s 5 p.m. deadline will begin Wednesday. Only one of the recounts is for a state Senate race; the remaining 18 are for state representative races. Yesterday afternoon, the secretary of state’s office scheduled the recount times and was assembling groups to count the ballots. “The secretary of state is responsible for coming up with counting teams,” said David Scanlan, deputy secretary of state. “They will be members of permanent staff here and part-time help,” he said, noting that the office has a pool of individuals who assist with recounts when needed.

New Mexico: Long-stalled voter ID legislation gets new life | Albuquerque Journal News

Over the past decade, Republicans in the Legislature have repeatedly introduced legislation to require voters to show photo identification at the polls, only to watch the bills die in committees run by Democrats. Next year could be different with the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the election last week. With a 37-33 majority, House Republicans will be able to get a photo voter ID bill through that chamber. The question is what would happen to it upon arrival in the Senate, where Democrats retain a 25-17 voting edge. Republican Secretary of State Dianna Duran, who made her support of photo voter ID a major theme of her successful re-election campaign, believes there is a chance of Senate approval. Some Democratic senators may be rethinking their positions after the GOP grabbed control of the House for the first time in more than a half-century, Duran says.

Oregon: Portland security firm has a warning for email voting | Portland Business Journal

It only took a couple days and tweaks to about 50 lines of code for a pair of security researchers from Portland-based Galois to demonstrate how hackers could change an election if email voting were to move beyond the pilot phase. Researchers Joseph Kiniry and Dan Zimmerman were able to show how files could be intercepted between the voter and election office through a relatively easy hack of standard router software. The duo looked at routers that are commonly used by household Internet Service Providers. “We did experiments on how it could be deployed if we were a bad guy,” Kiniry said. “Unfortunately, the state of security on these devices on the Internet is so poor.” Plus, he noted detecting that something was wrong was difficult and would take security experts to figure out the router was not working properly.

Texas: Turnout Down in Texas, and Democrats Claim a Reason: Voter ID Law | New York Times

Say this for the state’s new voter ID law — it gave Texas Democrats a patsy for the thumping they got on election night. Some Democrats blamed the law for keeping their voters at home last week. At the same time, another type of voting was growing — one that is historically more likely to result in election fraud. In his bid for re-election last week, Senator John Cornyn finished 27.2 percentage points ahead of his Democratic opponent, David Alameel. Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican who led every public poll conducted during the race for governor, proved those surveys right, finishing more than 20 percentage points ahead of the much-vaunted Wendy Davis, a Democrat. Mr. Abbott finished with more raw votes and a higher percentage of the total than Gov. Rick Perry in 2010. Ms. Davis finished with both a lower percentage of the vote than her 2010 counterpart, Bill White, a Democrat, and a lower vote count. The overall number of votes cast in this year’s election was less than in 2010 — by about 271,000. Although that appears to be part of a national trend, Texas Democrats blamed the state’s voter ID law, which they say discourages people from showing up.

Texas: Countywide voting, machine malfunctions account for Election Day confusion, clerk says | Southeast Texas Record

The confusion surrounding the last minute changes in election results had to do with some new laws in place and technical difficulties, county officials say. There has been controversy since the Nov. 4 General Election in Jefferson County, with a few Republican candidates going to bed thinking they were winners after most of the precincts had reported only to find Wednesday morning that they had actually lost the election. Chief Deputy County Clerk Theresa Goodness said watching the results based on precincts reporting can be misleading, because in Jefferson County voting is “countywide,” not limited to the precinct in which the voter resides. “In the 2013 constitutional amendment election , we changed to a countywide system. A voter can cast their ballot in any precinct on Election Day, just like in Early Voting,” Goodness said. Many voters aren’t even aware of that change, she said. So, for example, when it’s midnight and a candidate looks like they are ahead with 102 out of 106 precincts reporting, that really doesn’t mean every ballot has been counted for that precinct. So when Precinct 1 has turned in their ballots, that could mean there are ballots for different precincts in addition to Pct. 1, and Pct. 1 ballots could also be at other locations. Ballots from every precinct have to be turned in to accurately reflect an individual precinct’s votes, she said.

Editorials: Getting out the vote | Houston Chronicle

Most Texans really don’t care to vote. Only about 28.5 percent of eligible voters turned out for Tuesday’s election. And while apathy is often blamed for poor showings at the polls, this time around, we Texans had another factor to contend with: a new voter ID law, called by many the most stringent in the…

Vermont: Why a secret ballot will determine Vermont’s next governor | WCAX

Election results are in, but the race for governor may not be over. Gov. Peter Shumlin, D-Vermont, declared victory Wednesday, but Republican challenger Scott Milne called that premature Thursday. Unofficial results from The Associated Press, with 100 percent of the vote counted, show Shumlin with 46 percent (89,874) of the vote and  Milne with 45 percent (87,786) — a margin of just 2,088 votes. By historical standards that would be a safe margin for any potential recount, but Milne says he may still ask for one. Milne tells WCAX he has no plans to address the public until he gets more information about the final results, but he did release a statement to the press Thursday afternoon. Click here to read it. As long as neither candidate ultimately secures more than 50 percent of the ballots cast, the power to pick the state’s next Governor will fall to the legislature. When rookie and veteran lawmakers arrive for work at the Statehouse this January, picking a Governor will be one of their first tasks.

Virginia: Elections database crash worries registrars | The Washington Post

People trying to check results on the Virginia Board of Elections’ Web site Tuesday night were temporarily stymied when the server became overloaded and crashed, officials said. The nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project and a few media organizations were able to access the agency’s downloadable, public files and publish results of the most-watched contests — for the Senate, House of Representatives and Arlington County Board — on their own Web sites. But for a school board or a town council race, or a countywide bond issue, those results were hard to find.

Romania: Foreign minister resigns over elections abroad row | The Sofia Globe

Romania’s foreign minister Titus Corlatean said on November 10 that he submitted his resignation after renewed protests in Romania and abroad demanding his resignation and the opening of more voting stations outside the country for the presidential election run-off on November 16. The first round of the election on November 2 was marred by accusations that the foreign ministry failed to ensure a smooth voting process and that voting stations outside Romania did not have enough booths, staff and voting stamps. Several hundred people gathered for a protest outside the ministry’s building on the evening of November 2, while reports claimed that at some voting stations abroad, scuffles broke out between staff and people waiting to cast a ballot at closing time. New protests against the ministry’s decision not to open new polling stations were held on November 9. Some reports in Romanian media even accused the ministry of sabotaging the process by closing stations in areas with large immigrant communities while offering voting locations elsewhere in order to keep the number of voting stations unchanged, at 294, from the 2009 elections.

Spain: Catalans Back Independence in Symbolic Vote | Wall Street Journal

More than two million Catalans defied a Spanish court and voted overwhelmingly in favor of independence Sunday in a symbolic exercise that vividly brought home both the resolve of Catalan nationalists and the obstacles they face. The vote, overseen largely by volunteers and boycotted by most independence opponents, wasn’t binding and had little international credibility. But Catalans pointed to the high turnout, despite legal and logistical hurdles, to bolster their case to be permitted to hold a formal, binding referendum on separating their wealthy region from Spain. “We’ve earned the right,” said Catalan leader Artur Mas, after casting his ballot. Catalonia’s government estimated that 2.25 million people had participated. The region has about 6 million eligible voters. The ballot asked two questions—whether Catalonia should be a state and whether that state should be independent. With 88% of polling stations reporting returns, the government said that 80.7% answered yes to both questions, and another 10.1% answered yes to the first and no to the second. Some 4.5% voted no to both questions, the government said, and the rest of the ballots were blank. There was no sign, though, that the outcome would prompt Spain’s central government in Madrid to waver from its steadfast opposition to such a referendum.

The Voting News Weekly: The Voting New Weekly for November 3-9 2014

In the mid-term elections on Tuesday, voters encountered malfunctioning machines, website crashes and delayed polling place openings in polling places around the country, while new voter ID requirements contributed to heavy volume on national election protection hotlines. Nationwide the trend away from touchscreen voting machines continued with over 70 percent of votes cast on voter-marked paper…

National: Voters encounter faulty machines, website crashes and other sporadic Election Day problems | Associated Press

Voters around the country encountered malfunctioning machines, website crashes and delayed polling place openings, but the problems for the most part appeared sporadic rather than systemic and there was no immediate indication that they factored in the outcome of an election. Beyond routine mechanical problems, the midterm elections Tuesday also represented for some states the first major tests of new voter identification laws that opponents say disenfranchise minorities and the poor. In Texas, where the U.S. Supreme Court last month let stand a strict photo ID law, there were reports of “voter confusion about how and whether their votes would be counted,” according to Election Protection, a voter advocacy coalition. The law, which Democrats had said would prevent roughly 650,000 people from casting a ballot, meant voters had to show one of seven approved kinds of photo identification. The law has not previously been used in congressional elections or a high-profile race for governor such as the one Tuesday, won by Republican Greg Abbott.

National: Midterm Voter Suppression Election Protection Hotline Swamped | New Republic

t may never be possible to calculate exactly how many eligible voters were unable to vote Tuesday due to new voter-ID laws, registration problems, and polling location misinformation. Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center, wouldn’t give an estimate of how many people were likely blocked from the polls this year, but she did say that millions of Americans were affected by new changes, particularly laws passed after the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act last summer. In Texas alone, the implementation of a new voter-ID law meant that 600,000 registered voters lacked the proper identification. You can get a sense, though, of the scale of voter difficulties from the Election Protection Hotline (866-OUR-VOTE). The hotline is a project of the Election Protection Coalition, led by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The hotline handles calls from voters who need to know if they’re registered, find their assigned polling locations, and report difficulties in their attempts to vote. Yesterday, the national hotline had taken over 16,000 calls by 8 p.m., with 3.5 hours to go until polling ended. (By comparison, the hotline received 12,857 calls all day on Election Day in 2010.)

National: States ditch electronic voting machines | The Hill

States have abandoned electronic voting machines in droves, ensuring that most voters will be casting their ballots by hand on Election Day. With many electronic voting machines more than a decade old, and states lacking the funding to repair or replace them, officials have opted to return to the pencil-and-paper voting that the new technology was supposed to replace. Nearly 70 percent of voters will be casting ballots by hand on Tuesday, according to Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting. “Paper, even though it sounds kind of old school, it actually has properties that serve the elections really well,” Smith said. It’s an outcome few would have predicted after the 2000 election, when the battle over “hanging chads” in the Florida recount spurred a massive, $3 billion federal investment in electronic voting machines. States at the time ditched punch cards and levers in favor of touch screens and ballot-scanners, with the perennial battleground state of Ohio spending $115 million alone on upgrades. Smith said the mid-2000s might go down as the  “heyday” of electronic voting. Since then, states have failed to maintain the machines, partly due to budget shortfalls.

Verified Voting Blog: Online voting rife with hazards

Today Americans are voting in an election that could shift control of the U.S. Senate and significantly impact the direction our nation will take in the next few years. Yet, 31 states will allow over 3 million voters to cast ballots over the Internet in this election, a practice that computer security experts in both the federal government and the private sector have warned is neither secure nor trustworthy.

Most states’ online voting is limited to military and overseas voters, but Alaska now permits all voters to vote over the Internet. With a hotly contested Senate seat in Alaska, the use of an online voting system raises serious concerns about the integrity of Alaska’s election results. Alaska’s State Election Division has even acknowledged that its “secure online voting solution” may not be all that secure by posting this disclaimer on its website: “When returning the ballot through the secure online voting solution, your are [sic] voluntarily waving [sic] your right to a secret ballot and are assuming the risk that a faulty transmission may occur.”

Unfortunately, faulty transmission is only one of the risks of Internet voting. There are countless ways ballots cast over the Internet can be hacked and modified by cyber criminals. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, at the direction of Congress, has conducted extensive research into Internet voting in the last decade and published several reports that outline all the ways votes sent over the Internet can be manipulated without detection. After warning that there are many possible attacks that could have an undiscovered large-scale impact, the institute concluded that secure Internet voting is not yet achievable.

National: Voter laws: Stumbling blocks | The Economist

According to some civil-rights groups, voting on Tuesday was a bit of a mess. Changes to voting laws in more than a dozen states caused confusion, frustration, long lines and turned-away voters. Some people arrived at the polls in Texas without a valid photo-ID, while others in North Carolina were sent packing even though the state’s voter-ID law doesn’t take effect until 2016. Thousands of voters called hotlines complaining about inaccurate voter rolls, malfunctioning machines and bewildering new rules. Some volunteers at polling stations were reportedly just as flustered as everyone else. Such complaints are unsurprising. America wins few awards for administering orderly and streamlined elections. The way citizens register and vote is “still in the dark ages in many ways,” says Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Centre for Justice, a public-policy think-tank. Most states rely on a paper-based registration system, and many close registration weeks before election day. Few allow voters to vote early, which leads to crowding and last-minute hiccups at polling stations. Polling staff tend to be untrained volunteers, and many machines are either incredibly old or new and untested. Different states also have different voter laws, with little integration of voter data, which makes it tricky when people move.

Editorials: Did Voting Restrictions Determine the Outcomes of Key Midterm Races? | Ari Berman/The Nation

Bryan McGowan spent twenty-two years in the US Marine Corps, including four tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. When he was stationed at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina from 2005 until 2010, McGowan used same-day registration to register and vote during the early voting period in the state. He relocated to Georgia in 2010 because of his military service and returned to North Carolina in 2014. On the first day of early voting this year, McGowan arrived at his new polling place in western North Carolina to update his registration and vote, like he had done in the 2008 presidential election, but this time he was turned away. North Carolina eliminated same-day registration as part of the sweeping voting restrictions enacted by the Republican legislature in the summer of 2013. The registration deadline had passed, and McGowan was unable to update his registration and vote. “All I want to do is cast my vote,” the disabled veteran said. After fighting for his country abroad, McGowan felt betrayed by not being able to vote when he returned home. Sadly, McGowan’s story was not atypical this election year. Voters in fourteen states faced new voting restrictions at the polls for first time in 2014—in the first election in nearly fifty years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The number of voters impacted by the new restrictions exceeded the margin of victory in close races for senate and governor in North Carolina, Kansas, Virginia and Florida, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

Alaska: Knowns and Unknowns Among Uncounted Ballots | Alaska Public Media

With a few candidates up and down the ticket unsure whether they won or lost, a lot of Alaskans are looking to the thousands of ballots that remain uncounted. Division of Elections chief Gail Fenumiai says it’s too early to say exactly how many ballots are outstanding. “Right now we have, in the offices within the state, 23,608 absentee and early votes that are eligible to be counted,” said at mid-day today. They are from voters who live throughout the state, not in any particular district. “The majority of them are from non-rural areas of the state, meaning Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, the Mat-Su area,” she said. Those are, if you will, the known unknowns. But there are thousands of other kinds of ballots to be added to the total. It’s not clear how many are in these other categories.

Arizona: Glitch in Cochise County puts thousands of ballots on hold | KGUN

A major glitch in Cochise County held up thousands of ballots. The problem discovered hours after the polls closed last night. Cochise county elections officials had to scramble to fix it and asked Graham County to help out. A UHAUL full of black cases of ballots were rushed to Graham County where the ballots were re-tabulated — overnight and then transported back to Bisbee by 1 o’clock the next day. So what caused the glitch? The interim elections director Jim Vlahovich thought it was the machine that tabulates the votes. “We discovered last night that the sheets were 85 ballots short than what the machine was,” he said.

Arkansas: Voters Approve Extended Term Limits | Governing

A ballot measure aimed at tightening ethics laws and changing term limits in Arkansas bucked expectations and passed with 53 percent of the vote. The measure, officially called Issue 3, bans lobbyist gifts to state officials, prohibits direct corporate and union contributions to candidates and lengthens the time period before former lawmakers can become lobbyists (from one to two years). Those anti-lobbying and campaign finance reforms appeared to be headed for defeat because they were linked to an unpopular provision that sought to extend term limits for state lawmakers. Polling by Talk Business Research and Hendrix College showed that most likely voters supported the ethics reforms, but opposed a package that also included term-limit extensions. Arkansas term limits appeared untouchable. The 1992 ballot measure setting the term limits received a higher percentage of the vote than Bill Clinton, the state’s then-governor and a presidential candidate that year. Voters later rejected another ballot measure aimed at extending term limits by 40 points.

Connecticut: Hartford voting snafu may prompt changes to registrar system | New Haven Register

Yet another embarassing misstep during an election is prompting officials to seriously look for changes on the role of registrars of voters, but the political implications of doing so may prove daunting. A Hartford registrar of voters failed to get the voting lists to a number of polling stations in that city for the 6 a.m. opening, which meant that some voters were turned away. Those lists are supposed to be available for inspection by the public a week ahead of time and delivered to the polling sites by 5 a.m. on Election Day. Among the voters who were able to wait until the list was delivered was Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who was delayed a half-hour. Others, however, didn’t have that kind of flexibility and left without voting. The Democrats then obtained a court order that two polls remain open an additional half-hour Tuesday based on the testimony of people who had to leave.

New Hampshire: More people posting ballot selfies online in protest of law; legislators say they will move to repeal | Concord Monitor

Jonathan Spear barely made it to the polls in Hampton before they closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. He filled out his ballot and voted for all Republicans, with one exception: He just couldn’t bring himself to vote for Scott Brown. Instead, he wrote in the name of Revolutionary War Gen. John Stark. When he was done, he snapped a photo of himself inside the voting booth holding his completed ballot, a quick ballot selfie. Then, he decided to commit a crime – he posted the photo on Twitter. And Spear knew exactly what he was doing. “It’s a stupid law, and I don’t agree with it,” he said. “I’ve always been a bit of a rebel, and nothing beats a little civil disobedience to get your point across.” State law says it’s illegal to show another person your ballot, including through social media.

New Mexico: Glitches plague voting machines, clerk resorts to hand tallies | The Taos News

Taos County Clerk Anna Martinez spent nearly 12 hours Tuesday (Nov. 4) driving around from voter precinct to voter precinct troubleshooting issues with the new ballot machines supplied by the state. Due to problems with machines in nearly half of the county’s 36 precincts, staff at the clerk’s office had to hand-tally the ballots from 16 precincts — delaying the election result reports until 1 a.m. Wednesday morning. ”It’s hard to get into a new machine that you don’t know anything about,” Martinez told The Taos News Wednesday. The Taos News received a handful of comments and calls complaining of problems with the machines. Despite the problems, Martínez insisted the vote totals were accurate.

North Dakota: Determined voter derailed after driving 200 miles | Bismarck Tribune

A man spent his election day in a failed attempt to cast his ballot by first learning his new address wasn’t on file at a polling location in Bismarck then crisscrossing the state to his old voting location in Dickinson at the suggestion of poll workers. Kyle Thiel, of Bismarck, is one of a handful of voters who reported being turned away from the polls Tuesday when his updated address information wasn’t found in the state’s central voter file. Thiel, 32, explained Thursday via email that he moved to Bismarck in August from Dickinson. On Aug. 25, he updated his address online through the North Dakota Department of Transportation website as directed on the back of his driver’s license. Although he’d updated his information online, Thiel said his license still had his Dickinson address on it. He said he hadn’t found the time to go get a new license, something he acknowledged would have helped. When Thiel went to vote in Bismarck, local election workers couldn’t find his updated address information in the system. After being directed to the DOT office for verification, he was told that information couldn’t be accessed.

Texas: Jefferson County Clerk blames faulty voting equipment for delay | KBMT

Jefferson County Clerk Carolyn Guidry seemed pleased at voter turnout for the 2014 mid-term elections in Jefferson County. She says 37% of the county’s 146,039 registered voters cast ballots, that’s 53,710 voters who participated. However Guidry, who won re-election herself, was not pleased at how the county’s electronic voting system performed. Malfunctions caused the vote count to be delayed, and final results were not available until 4:00 a.m. the day after the elections. Guidry said, “It’s very frustrating when I have employees working 24 hours on elections, because of the flaws of a system.” Guidry blames ES&S voting equipment the county purchased in 2006.  Tuesday’s flaw was with the scanner that counts mail-in ballots, forcing Guidry to call for a technician to fix it, the closest one was in Tyler. It would take until 4 a.m. the next day to count all 3900 mail-in ballots, and when they were all counted some Republicans who had been in the lead, ended up losing.  Guidry says that’s because two-thirds of the mail-in ballots favored Democrats. But the mail-in ballot scanner was not the only problem of the night, not all voting machines had been shut down which made it impossible for votes in those machines to be counted.