Heavy turnout in Milwaukee led the city Election Commission to call out the reserves Tuesday. Extra poll workers were sent to polling places at Becher Terrace, Bradley Tech High School, Keenan Health Center, Morse Middle School, Rufus King International School Middle Years Campus and Cass Street, 53rd Street, Grantosa and Parkview schools, said Sue Edman, the election commission’s executive director. The backup workers were needed to handle long lines, partly because a significant number of new voters were registering at the polls, Edman said. “We knew things would be busy, but we didn’t know how busy,” Edman said. In some cases, poll workers were shifted from less-crowded polling places to busier ones, Edman said. In other cases, she used poll workers who had agreed to be on call or city administrators who had volunteered to help out, she said.
Voting machines broke down or jammed twice at New Hope Missionary Baptist Church and once each at Manitoba School and the OASIS Senior Center, Edman said. Each time, voters were asked to place their ballots in secure bins so that poll workers could feed them into the machines after they were repaired, usually within 15 or 20 minutes, she said. That was a smaller number of voting machine problems than the city usually encounters, Edman said. And confusion arose at the Zablocki Library, when poll workers told some registered voters their names weren’t listed in the poll books.
The first time Megan Knudson went to vote, she was informed that her name did not appear in the poll book for Ward 260 and she was offered the opportunity to re-register. “I chose to leave the polls,” Knudson said. Redistricting is to blame for Knudson’s and other residents’ confusion, Edman said.
Full Article: Milwaukee calls in extra poll workers amid heavy turnout – JSOnline.