Virginia: Prince William County board creates independent panel to look into long lines on Election Day | The Washington Post

The Prince William Board of County Supervisors voted unanimously on Tuesday to appoint an independent, bipartisan panel to look at why many voters waited hours on Election Day to cast their ballot. The panel would also make recommendations about how the county can avoid such problems in the future. The Nov. 6 lines were the worst at the River Oaks precinct at Potomac Middle School, in a Democratic-leaning, minority district, where voters waited in some cases more than four hours to vote. The last vote there was cast at 10:45 p.m., and election officials acknowledged that the biggest problem was lack of voting machines.

Israel: Likud party primary extended due to electronic voting machines problems | EJP

The Likud party primary vote to choose the list of party candidates forthe  January 22 parliamentary election, that began on Sunday, will continue on Monday, the Likud Central Election Committee decided on Sunday night. 50 to 60 polling stations will be open to voters from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. The decision was made based on problems with electronic polling machines on Sunday. Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar called the Likud primary elections held Sunday a “farce” because of problems with electronic voting machines and demanded the polls be halted and held again on a later date.

Pennsylvania: 90% turnout in Philadelphia precincts rumor was 100% wrong | Philly.com

Less than 24 hours after President Obama took Pennsylvania, state Republican leaders were suggesting massive vote fraud in Philadelphia. “I was told that 90 percent of the precincts in Philadelphia . . . turned out over 90 percent of voters,” said the state House speaker, Sam Smith. “It’s questionable.” At the time, no actual turnout figures were available, but now they are: Of the city’s 1,687 voting divisions, only one reported turnout over 90 percent, and election officials said that was a clear mistake. Two divisions in Southwest Philadelphia’s 40th Ward were both assigned to the same polling location, the Paschallville Library on Woodland Avenue. When poll workers were setting up operations for the day, they mistakenly traded the voting machines preprogrammed for each division.

Israel: Likud officials: Netanyahu likely to halt primaries over voting malfunctions Israel News | Haaretz

Likud officials said on Sunday that they believed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would accept an offer to halt electronic voting procedures in Likud’s primaries, opting to continue the elections through casting individual ballots. The proposal was raised by Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon, following a day rife with reports of voting computer malfunctions. Problems were reported at locations including Jerusalem’s main polling station — the International Convention Centers, where 80 computerized voting systems were shut down — and at the polling station in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Yad Eliyahu, which was also shut down. Other locations with reported malfunctions were Ramat Gan, Ashdod, Gan Yavne and Mt. Hebron Regional Council.

Voting Blogs: Three Ways to Fix Our Democracy | Brennan Center for Justice

The 2012 election is over, but there are still clear challenges to the integrity of our democracy. A wave of laws passed in the last two years to make it harder for millions of eligible Americans to vote. Fortunately, most of the worst were blocked or weakened. But they had a clear impact on Election Day — long lines and confusion at the polls, compounded by broken voting machines and poorly trained poll workers. As President Obama said in his speech, “We have to fix that.” Here are three ways to improve our democracy and bring it into the 21st century.

New York: Lever voting machine sales draw a light turnout | Times Union

They are complex machines, controlled by rows of switches and reset by a giant lever that activates a series of dials, switches, counters and a little bill. For decades these iron behemoths put a mechanical imprimatur on the annual rite of democracy, locking in the selections of millions of New Yorkers, from FDR to Nelson Rockefeller. Now they’re worth less than $42. The 2002 Help America Vote Act led to the statewide replacement of the old lever voting machines in time for the 2010 elections with paper ballots logged by electronic scanners. Since then counties have been either warehousing or auctioning off the old machines, or wondering in general how they can rid of them. “They have very little value anymore,” Saratoga County Republican Elections Commissioner Roger Schiera said.

South Carolina: The Great Richland County Election Debacle of 2012 | Free Times

There’s a saying: If you don’t like the weather in South Carolina, wait five minutes. This year, that might also be said for election results. The Great Richland County Election Debacle of 2012 is already being described in monumental terms. In news stories, The State has called it “perhaps the mother of all bungled county elections in modern S.C. history.” State Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian summed it up in fewer words. “It’s f#!ked up,” he said. Richland County Democratic Rep. Mia Butler characterized it even more succinctly. “Inexcusable,” she called the county’s election process in an open letter to media and her constituents.

US Virgin Islands: Outcome unchanged on St. Croix after board finishes counting votes | Virgin Islands Daily News

Almost two weeks after the General Election, the St. Croix Board of Elections on Monday morning wrapped up counting all elements of the vote, an official said. The final tallying of votes did not change the outcome of the election or displace any of the winners, which have held their leads since electronic votes were totaled on the evening of Nov. 6, just after the polls closed for the General Election.

Virginia: Paper Ballots In Prince William County? | NBC4

According to PotomacLocal.com, Prince William County has decided to use paper ballots in elections, following long lines at the polls on Election Day. The local-news website tweeted the news Tuesday night: “Breaking News: Prince William County Board of Elections to institute use of paper ballots following long lines at polls Nov. 6.” On Election Day, some voters in the county waited for up to four hours to vote. The long lines attracted some press reports – including from News4’s Voter Patrol – and even national attention. But it also prompted concern for the Board of Elections.

South Carolina: Lawmaker apologizes for Richland County election mess | TheState.com

A state lawmaker from Richland County has issued a public apology for the bungled Richland County elections Nov. 6, calling them a “colossal failure” that caused hundreds if not thousands of people “to drop out of long voting lines.” The statement by Rep. Mia Butler Garrick, D-Richland, made last week in a blast email to friends and supporters, was the first apology by an elected state official to date about the election missteps marked by severe shortages and multiple breakdowns of voting machines. Never in memory have Richland County elections been so trouble-plagued, local politicians have said.

National: Federal Election Assistance Commission under scrutiny | Hattiesburg American

Republican lawmakers say it’s time to do away with the federal commission that has given states election-related advice for the past years. The lawmakers say the Election Assistance Commission has outlived its usefulness. “We do not need a separate federal agency for the small number of useful functions it performs,’’ said Republican Rep. Gregg Harper of Mississippi, who introduced a bill last year to shut down the commission. “They can be accomplished more efficiently within another agency.” The EAC drew new attention after the Nov. 6 election.

US Virgin Islands: Elections Board members question investigation | Virgin Islands Daily News

As the St. Thomas-St. John Board of Elections on Tuesday resumed counting paper ballots from the week-old General Election, tension is showing between some board members and the V.I. attorney general, who announced late last week that his office will investigate the territory’s election. Allegations of improprieties on and surrounding Election Day have been widespread. The St. Thomas-St. John Board, for instance, did not certify its voting machines until about 12 hours before the polls opened and failed to conduct a public test of the machines working properly prior to certification.

Editorials: Nationalize Oversight and Control of Elections | NYTimes.com

Long lines. New voting machines that don’t work right. Poll workers wrongfully asking for photo ID. Democratic election officials keeping Republican poll watchers out of Philadelphia polling places. We have come to expect such stories on Election Day. As much drama is generated by the obstacles voters must overcome as by their choice of candidate. A nonpartisan board, with a chief selected by a Congressional supermajority, could set standards and choose procedures. There is a better way. We can do things as they are done in most mature democracies, like Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Nationalize our elections and impose professional nonpartisan administrators. A neutral election board with its allegiance to the integrity of the voting process rather than to a political party should take on the basic tasks of voting. The goal would be to make sure that all eligible voters, but only eligible voters, could cast a vote that would be accurately counted.

Kansas: ES&S must fix electronic poll books, election officials say | Wichita Eagle

More than $370,000 worth of electronic equipment won’t be used in local city and school elections early next year if the vendor doesn’t correct problems with the software, Sedgwick County Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman said. There have been ongoing problems with the county’s 130 electronic poll books that were first used earlier this year, she said. “The vendor will have to fix that before we use them again,” she said. “The books have made it far more cumbersome for us. For the election administrators, they’re just a nightmare.”

Pennsylvania: Philadelphia voting glitches counted: 27,000 provisional ballots | NewsWorks

A Philadelphia election official says more than 27,000 voters had to cast provisional ballots in the city last Tuesday, apparently confirming reports from citizens and election watchdogs that there were an unusual number of glitches at city polling places. City Commissioner Al Schmidt said the 27,100 provisional ballots is roughly twice as many as were cast in the last presidential election. The number is equal to about 4 percent of the ballots cast using electronic voting machines. Provisional ballots are paper ballots used when a voter’s registration status is in doubt. The ballot is sealed and opened once the voter’s status is verified.

South Carolina: High court orders Richland County ballots returned | AP

South Carolina’s Supreme Court has ordered state police to return ballots and voting machines to Richland County officials so that they can be tallied, ruling on Tuesday that a lower court didn’t have jurisdiction to order a recount. The justices also gave county officials until noon Friday to canvass the votes and give the results to state authorities, who will certify them later that day. Any disputes with election results must be filed by Nov. 21.

South Carolina: Richland County vote count resumes today | TheState.com

Richland County voters could learn as early as this afternoon what the county’s official results are in the Nov. 6 county elections. Votes will be tallied beginning at 1 p.m. on the fourth floor of the county administration building on Harden Street, Election Commission chairwoman Liz Crum said Tuesday evening. “We will get this done, and we will get it done right,” Crum said. Election observers and news media can observe county officials do the count. “Everybody on hand can watch the canvassing,” she said. “We never finished counting the vote – this is not a recount.”

Virginia: Monies Would’ve Not Gone for New Voter Machines | Potomac Local

Officials failed to forecast the record turnout at polls on Tuesday. Woodbridge’s River Oaks voting precinct has more than 4,000 active registered voters assigned to it and saw a 64 percent voter turnout rate Tuesday. Voters here waited in long lines, and in line before the polls closed at 7 p.m. waited for up to four hours to cast their votes. President Barack Obama won handily over Mitt Romney with 84 percent of the vote at this precinct. Democrats also turned out in droves to other precincts in eastern Prince William County like Lynn in Woodbridge, and Godwin and Dale in Dale City.

Virginia: Long lines reignite push for early voting in Virginia | Washington Examiner

A week after Virginians waited in line for hours to vote for president, there’s a new push in the state to allow residents to vote early. Sen. Janet Howell, D-Reston, has tried repeatedly over the years to loosen the state’s early voting restrictions without success. But she said voter frustration with long lines may have given her new momentum. “A lot of voters are very angry because they had to wait in such long lines,” Howell said. “I’m hopeful that anger will help get it passed. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. It should be about making it easy for people to vote.”

Hawaii: Office of Elections Apologizes for Election Day Glitches That Left 24 Polling Places Without Paper Ballots | Hawaii Reporter

Election officials have confirmed 24 out of 140 polling places on the island of Oahu ran out of paper ballots during the General Election on Tuesday, November 6. (See the list here – BALLOT INVENTORY ISSUES BY POLLING PLACE). The number was originally reported as 5 polling places, but by the day after the election, that number had increased by nearly five times. With just one electronic voting machine at each location, only about 10 voters per hour could be accommodated. Others waited in line for sometimes more than hour for additional paper ballots to arrive.

Iowa: Ballot discrepancies force recount in three state races | KWWL.com

The Black Hawk County Auditor’s Office will request an administrative recount in two precincts for the legislative elections after apparent discrepancies in vote totals at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Cedar Falls and Irv Warren Pro Shop in Waterloo. “We don’t expect the outcomes of these races to change, but they’re close enough that we didn’t think we should leave anything to chance,” said Black Hawk County Auditor Grant Veeder. The recount could impact the races for Senate District 30 and House Districts 59 and 60.

South Carolina: Losing candidate calls for new election over voting machine shortage | The Augusta Chronicle

A Republican who lost a bid to unseat a Richland County councilman called for a new election Monday, accusing county elections officials of intentionally not putting out enough voting machines on Election Day. Michael Letts said at a news conference Monday that thousands of voters abandoned hourslong lines because there were not enough machines. Letts lost to County Councilman Jim Man­ning, 37 percent to 63 percent, but said he was also worried about a county sales tax vote. By a margin of more than 9,000 votes, Richland County voted to increase sales tax by a penny, a decision that supporters have said will mean a $1 billion windfall for the area. Letts, who opposed the increase, said fewer voting machines were sent to areas that had voted against the measure when it was first put to voters in 2010. “A law was broken, deliberately, before the polls were ever opened,” Letts said.

South Carolina: Republicans, Democrats agree: South Carolina elections a mess | SFGate

Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on much in South Carolina, but the leaders of both parties said this year’s elections were a mess. More than 200 candidates were kicked off the June primary ballot because of paperwork problems. Voters waited four hours or more to vote Tuesday in one of the state’s largest counties, and there was an unprecedented seizure of votes. The way people are elected was in the news more than the politicians themselves. “Both parties have spent more money, more time and more effort in court than we have on the political side. It’s been exasperating,” said South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian.

South Carolina: Vote-counting expert, former voting machines’ technician detail possible missteps in Richland County’s election | TheState.com

Planning Richland County’s 2012 election didn’t require rocket science, yet the ship exploded. Critics – which is pretty much everyone – say last week’s voting was an utter mess. Election Day was entwined with unmatched voter frustration, people who walked away because of long lines, vote-counting delays, lawsuits, ballot seizures, an election protest and recriminations about the motives of some county election officials. Early voters, trying to get a jump on Tuesday’s election, lined the sidewalk on Harden street at the Richland County administration building all day on Monday.

Florida: Gov. Scott not anxious to fix voting problems | Fox51

Florida Governor Rick Scott says he will take a look at some voting changes in the wake of massive lines in counties across Florida, but did not seem anxious to get to work on them. “What I want to do now is sit down with the Secretary of State and say, ‘What can we, how can improve this?'” Ballot tabulation machines failed repeatedly, and most of the polling places in Orange and Seminole County only had one machine per precinct.

US Virgin Islands: Thousands of votes will not be counted until Friday | Virgin Islands Daily News

Virtually no race on the V.I. ballot Tuesday could be definitively settled as of Wednesday night because at least 4,319 paper ballots have yet to be counted. The Boards of Elections in both districts have indicated that they likely will not begin tallying the votes until Friday. With the exception of Delegate to Congress Donna Christensen, who won with an 8,000 vote margin; Senator-At-Large Craig Barshinger, who won with a 6,000-vote margin; and Clifford Graham, who topped the St. Thomas-St. John Senate race by a margin of 1,969 votes, the order and outcome of almost every other race could, mathematically, change once the paper ballots are counted.

Massachusetts: Itsy bitsy spider goes up the voting machine, causes malfunction, delays count in Massachusetts town | The Washington Post

It wasn’t hanging chads or voter fraud that delayed the vote count in one Massachusetts town — it was a spider. Rehoboth Town Clerk Kathleen Conti says one of the town’s aging voting machines malfunctioned Tuesday morning. She called a technician, who said a spider web apparently prevented the machine’s scanner from counting ballots. Conti tells The Sun Chronicle of Attleboro (http://bit.ly/XmzmSj ) all Rehoboth’s voting machines received preventive maintenance a month ago.

National: Long lines, confusion reveal flaws in US elections | Missoulian

Even as President Barack Obama was about to give his victory speech early Wednesday, dozens of Florida voters waited in line waiting to cast ballots more than five hours after the polls officially closed. Thousands of people in Virginia, Tennessee and elsewhere also had to vote in overtime. Well into the 21st century, it strikes many people as indefensible that the U.S. can’t come up with a more streamlined and less chaotic election system. The president said as much at the very start of his speech. “I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time,” Obama said. “By the way, we have to fix that.” Easier said than done. There’s no single entity that sets the rules for voting in this country. Congress and the states enact overall election laws, but in most places it comes down to county or even city officials to actually run them. And those local systems are prone to problems. “We have 10,000 different systems. I wish there were only 50,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California-Irvine and author of “The Voting Wars.”

New York: Nassau to probe voting machine failures | Newsday

More than 200 new electronic voting machines in Nassau County jammed on Election Day, forcing voters to cast some 20,000 paper ballots and delaying final tabulations in some close races, election officials said. About 4 percent of the 463,000 Nassau voters who went to the polls Tuesday had to place paper ballots into emergency ballot boxes when the machines malfunctioned, said Democratic Board of Elections Commissioner William Biamonte. In 2010 and 2011, such breakdowns affected less than 1 percent of voters, he said. Similar problems were reported in New York City. Suffolk Republican Deputy Elections Commissioner Bill Ellis said the county experienced only minor issues “that were easily corrected.” Suffolk uses a different vendor than Nassau and the city.