(The New Yorker) - When voters showed up at Anderson-Livsey Elementary School in Gwinnett County, Georgia, this morning, they found voting machines but no power cords. At Annistown Elementary, not far away, poll watchers reported that the polling place could not open because every single voting machine was broken. In parts of Atlanta, where the average wait to vote has been three hours, election workers are running out of ballot cards for the voting machines and, with an insufficient number of provisional ballots, may effectively disenfranchise voters. At an arts center in Mebane, North Carolina, where broken machines are leading to long wait times, voters were told—erroneously—that if they left the line they’d forfeit their right to vote. In Greensboro, even voters who had cast ballots in the primary were told that they’d been placed on the “inactive” voter rolls. In Pennsylvania, broken machines across the state, but especially in Philadelphia, caused polling places to open late and people to walk away before they’d had a chance to vote. “We saw these issues cropping up in early voting,” Karen Hobert Flynn, the president of Common Cause, an organization with six thousand five hundred volunteers monitoring polling places in thirty states, said this afternoon. “These are old machines.”
Common Cause is one organization among the two hundred that make up the Election Protection Coalition, which runs the largest nonpartisan voter hotline in the country—some four thousand lawyers fielding calls from people attempting to vote. The D.C. call center is actually two operations: on one floor, about forty lawyers, talking into headsets and typing into computers, sit shoulder-to-shoulder in a small conference room talking to stymied voters who don’t know where to vote, or why their polling place is closed, or whether they are registered, or why the poll worker is telling them they are not registered, to name just a few of the more common problems that are cropping up. On another floor, there are even more volunteers, some monitoring social media—a Facebook group promising violence if Stacey Abrams is elected governor of Georgia; another telling Democrats that they vote on Wednesday—and others watching for problematic trends in particular states, some of which have their own, state-specific election-protection call centers as well.
“We are prepared to mount emergency litigation, if necessary,” Kristen Clarke, the executive director of the National Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Election Protection Coalition’s lead organization, said this morning. “We are fighting so every voter’s voice is heard.” Read More
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