Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Election commission: Voting problems widespread

Mountainous stacks of unopened absentee ballots cluttered South Florida election centers. Sixty-year-old voting machines jammed, forcing New Yorkers to stand in lines three blocks long. Punch-card machines went unused in Ohio because poll workers didn't know how to plug them in.
The four members of the new U.S. Election Assistance Commission met Tuesday to compare horror stories while acting as federal observers in the Nov. 2 election. America is lucky that President Bush was re-elected by a 3 million-vote margin, they said, or the nation would again be wracked by election uncertainty.
"The margin was enough that the glitches were not important," concluded commission Chairman DeForest Soaries. "The bad news is, we still don't live up to the expectations that democracy demands."

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