At 4:45 p.m. the line was back and even longer stretching out into and through the main library parking lot. It was at least three times longer than the one I'd seen going in. I spoke with a young woman who was heading back to her car after voting and she said she'd been waiting for over two hours and her line had been much shorter when she had begun her trek. We agreed the current wait must be over four hours (and the polls "close" in just over three). "Close," of course, means no one else can get in line. If you're already there--and stay there--you're good to go.
The six o'clock news had numerous reports of extra-long lines at polling places throughout the county. It turns out the number of actual voting machines assigned to each precinct is based on the number of registered voters (reasonable enough) as a per centage of total voters (O.K.) and as a result many precincts received exactly one voting machine (seriously?! WTF?). The extra-long ballot took close to a minute to feed into the machine meaning a maximum of 60-70 voters per hour throughput, until the machine malfunctioned, which some of them did more than once. In addition, the elderly and handicapped were not accommodated but were expected to stand in line with everyone else.
There are already letters to the editor in the newspaper (the very next day in a morning paper which is kind of impressive in itself) charging incompetence, which I am inclined to believe, and claiming intentional voter suppression, which doesn't make a lot of sense since this is a heavily Republican area and the election was put together by Republicans. As I said yesterday, I don't tend to make political predictions, but I think this will be remembered next cycle, and not to the advantage of those in charge.
Fortunately, our swing state was not determinative to the outcome after all, so our election was merely farce, not tragedy.
No comments:
Post a Comment