By IRNA,
New York : Millions of voters will encounter an unfamiliar low-tech landscape at the polls on Tuesday, experts say.
About half of all voters will vote in a way that is different from what they did in the last presidential election, and most will use paper ballots rather than the touch-screen machines that have caused concern among voting experts.
But the change does not guarantee a smooth election day, as the nation’s voting system remains untested for what is expected to be an unprecedented turnout.
Six years after the largest federal overhaul in how elections are run, voting experts are still predicting machine and ballot shortages in several swing states and late tallies on election night.
Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens.
But paper ballots bring their own potential problems, voting experts say.
The scanners can break down, leading to delays and confusion for poll workers and voters.
And the paper ballots of about a third of all voters will be counted not at the polling place but later at a central county location.
That means that if a voter has made an error – not filling in an oval properly, for example, a mistake often made by the kind of novice voters who will be flocking to the polls – it will not be caught until it is too late. As a result, those ballots will be disqualified.
Voting rights groups have also filed lawsuits against election officials in Pennsylvania and Virginia, saying they have not stocked enough paper ballots to prepare for the expected turnout.
Most voting experts are not predicting a repeat of the Florida meltdown of 2000, but they are warning that shortages of electronic voting machines or printed ballots in swing states, along with problems verifying the identity of voters, could worsen lines and fray nerves.
“What has traditionally happened in this country is that a change in voting equipment happens once in the lifetime of an election official,” said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a voting research firm.
“This time, nearly 60 percent of the country will vote in places that in the last eight years have changed their voting equipment.” About a fourth of voters will still use electronic machines that offer no paper record to verify that their choice was accurately recorded, even though these machines are vulnerable to hacking and crashes that drop votes.
The machines will be used by most voters in Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.
Eight other states, including Georgia, Maryland, New Jersey and South Carolina, will use touch-screen machines with paper trails.
In states with early voting, there have been scattered reports of touch-screen machine malfunctions, ballot misprints causing scanners to jam and vote-flipping, in which the vote cast for one candidate is recorded for another.
Florida has switched to its third ballot system in the past three election cycles, and glitches associated with the transition have caused confusion at early voting sites, election officials said.
The state went back to using scanned paper ballots this year after touch-screen machines in Sarasota County failed to record any choice for 18,000 voters in a fiercely contested House race in 2006.
Voters in Colorado, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have reported using touch-screen machines that at least initially registered their choice for the wrong candidate or party.
“I pushed the Democrat ticket, and it jumped to the Republican ticket for president of the United States,” said Calvin Thomas, 81, an Obama supporter who tried to vote early in Ripley, West Virginia.
“I’m a registered Republican, and I’ve voted in every presidential election since 1948. I don’t like seeing my vote do something I didn’t tell it to do. I take that real serious.”
Thomas’s daughter, Micki Clendenin, said the same thing had happened to her.
In both cases, poll workers at the site had them touch the screen a few more times, and the voting machine changed their ballot to their candidate choice.
State and local officials said these were isolated cases and that poll workers had fixed the problems.
“It was corrected,” Clendenin said, “but it still made me wonder.” It was not supposed to be this way.
After the debacle of 2000, Congress passed a federal law, the Help America Vote Act, to avoid similar mishaps.
It included money for new machines to modernize the voting process.
But in many ways, things have become even messier. The first machines bought with the federal money were largely touch-screens and brought new problems, decreasing public confidence in the process and doubling the number of election-related lawsuits since 2000.