While the midterm elections appear to have avoided any major problems with foreign interference, voters and poll monitoring groups across the country reported hours-long lines, unexpected delays in opening polling places, and technical issues with voting machines.
“We received reports quite quickly on election day of a number of polling sites in Harris County, which is the home of Houston, of polling sites not only not being open at 7 a.m. but of significant delays,” says James Slattery, senior staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which won a court order keeping polls open late at locations with delayed openings.
In New York, City Council Speaker Corey Johnson called upon Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan to resign after widespread delays, some attributed to problems with ballot scanning equipment. And elsewhere, technical issues and other problems led to extensive backlogs of voters that sometimes made it a challenge for people with job and family obligations to cast their ballots, says Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. More than 31,000 voters from around the country contacted the group’s Election Protection hotline about potential voting issues, she says.
“In South Carolina and Georgia, we certainly saw long lines in a number of parts of the state, some of which extended as long as three or four hours in length,” she says.
In Georgia, those voting machine problems only served to fan distrust in Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, who as secretary of state was also the state’s highest election official. (He formally resigned the office on Thursday after claiming victory, though many news organizations still say it’s too close to call.)
“It’s like using a laptop from 2002”
Experts say it’s not surprising that technical problems popped up at polling places—after all, many states and local jurisdictions are still running systems purchased under the federal Help America Vote Act, a law passed by Congress in 2002 in wake of the disputed 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
“We have been seeing voting machine malfunctions across the country in this election because many, many jurisdictions in the United States have voting systems that are old and outdated,” says Jamila Benkato, counsel at the nonprofit group Protect Democracy. “It’s like using a laptop from 2002 in the year 2018.”
