Sometimes voting 'don't come easy'
JUST AFTER getting to work yesterday morning, Philadelphia election officials got a call from a woman with an urgent complaint: 10 people were lined up outside at their polling place but the building was locked up tight.
JUST AFTER getting to work yesterday morning, Philadelphia election officials got a call from a woman with an urgent complaint: 10 people were lined up outside at their polling place but the building was locked up tight.
Where could they vote?
It was among the first of more than 400 calls from people who thought it was Election Day in Philadelphia, according to workers in the city commissioners office.
"We've been telling people the only way they can vote is to get in their car and drive to Jersey," joked Tim Dowling, a campaignfinance specialist in the office.
"We were very patient and explained [that] there was a primary in New Jersey but not here," said another worker who asked not to be identified.
"Most people were very polite; they apologized for calling. But some of them insisted, they knew it was Election Day and they were going to vote. So we told them to go over the bridge."
*
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine was scheduled to vote about 6 a.m., but poll workers were still struggling to get the voting machines ready and he had to wait about half an hour.
"If you look across the state, this kind of thing will happen on a random basis in almost any election," said Corzine, who dismissed the problem.
* In Los Angeles, at least one polling station reported having not received its voting machines as voters arrived. The voters were sent to nearby polls.
_ Georgia voters faced hourlong
lines stemming from problems with electronic voter-registration rolls.
Just outside Atlanta, at least 50 voters were turned away from a polling station in Lithonia, because many had been assigned to a new precinct after long lines occurred in the last election. Election officials said they had sent notices informing voters of their new polling station, five miles away, but most of the voters who were sent away said they had never been told of the change, said Deetric Hicks, a lawyer and volunteer poll monitor.
In Atlanta, several touch-screen voting machines were not functioning properly, leading to long lines at the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers.
Election officials handed out provisional ballots, said Clare Schexnyder, a spokeswoman for the election hot line.
* In Phoenix, Ariz., Scot McKenzie, 37, a sound engineer, was forced to cast a provisional ballot because the registration rolls said he was at the wrong polling place. "It was a complete disaster," said McKenzie, 37.
McKenzie said that at least 50 people had been told the same thing and that all of them had ended up voting provisionally.
Within the hour, he said, the polling station ran out of envelopes to hold the provisional ballots.
Voters at three other polling places reported similar problems. *
-Associated Press
