Just Try Voting Here: 11 of America's Worst Places to Cast a Ballot (or Try)
Machines that count backward, slice-and-dice districts, felon baiting, phone jamming, and plenty of dirty tricks
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#1 The New Poll Tax
Atlanta, Georgia
In 2005, Georgia state legislators passed a bill requiring voters to present either a driver's license or a state-issued photo ID that costs between $20 and $35 and is available only from Department of Motor Vehicles offices. Supporters claimed this was necessary to keep people from casting votes in someone else's name, even though Georgia secretary of state Cathy Cox noted that her office had no evidence of this happening. Either way, the measure is likely to have a dramatic effect on who can vote. Two-thirds of the state's counties don't even have a DMV office; Atlanta, the state's largest city, has just one, where waits at the ID counters often run to several hours. In late June, the secretary of state issued a report finding that more than half a million active-status, registered voters in Georgia don't have valid photo IDs. Fully 17.3 percent of African American voters, and one-third of black voters over age 65, wouldn't be able to cast a ballot under the law. When the federal Department of Justice had five experts examine the ID legislation in 2005, four of them objected to it, as the Washington Post discovered. But higher-ups at Justice overruled them and the measure (pushed by conservative think tanks such as the American Center for Voting Rights) went on the books. In October of last year a judge blocked its implementation, and the law -- along with another version that offers free voter IDs -- remains in limbo as appeals continue.
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#2 Machine Meltdowns
Beaufort, North Carolina; Fort Worth, Texas; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (tie)
In 2004, a touch-screen voting machine in Beaufort, North Carolina, erased 4,439 ballots cast during early voting two weeks before Election Day; they were never recovered. A similar problem in Burke County, North Carolina, resulted in several thousand votes for president not being counted. And, according to the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a voting machine in Ohio managed to add 4,000 extra votes for Bush. But those episodes, voting experts say, are just a preview of balloting debacles to come: The federal Help America Vote Act requires most counties to replace punch-card or lever machines with newer technology by the end of this year, and election officials are scrambling to meet the deadline. Already during this spring's primaries, reports of trouble multiplied: Initial results in Fort Worth, Texas, showed 150,000 votes being tabulated in a county where only about 50,000 people voted. In Pottawattamie County, Iowa, machines suddenly began counting some candidates' votes backward. In Philadelphia, more than 5 percent of voting machines broke down on primary day.
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#3 Line Forms Here
Franklin County, Ohio
Like many states, Ohio theoretically requires equal treatment of voters in all parts of the state; in practice, it frequently ignores its own requirements, especially in urban, predominantly Democratic, neighborhoods. In Franklin County, for example, more than 2,500 voters in the city of Columbus found themselves crammed into a single precinct in 2004, even though the state's guidelines call for no more than 1,400 -- apparently because officials assumed that in a poor neighborhood, turnout would be low. The state only partially reimburses counties for buying electronic voting machines, so Franklin, like many poor counties, didn't have enough machines on hand to start with. When record numbers of voters showed up, massive lines snaked toward the handful of machines. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has sued Ohio; among the complainants was an elderly woman with arthritis who had to leave because no one could find a place for her to sit.
Runners-up: New Orleans and St. Louis have long been plagued by long lines in poor neighborhoods; in 2000, so many polling places failed to open on time in St. Louis that a judge ordered the polls be kept open late, a ruling that Republicans battled to the last minute. In Broward County, Florida, waits stretched to four hours even during early voting in 2004; on Election Day at least one polling station didn't open until the early afternoon, and poll workers frantically calling the county elections office got nothing but busy signals.
More:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15502.htm
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