2016 Election Night

Today roughly 100 million people are trying to vote across the country, each using a wide range of technologies — many of which fail — facing different ballots and governed by local rules that are enforced by people with varying degrees of experience at the polls. In short, there are bound to be problems. So far, the problems don’t seem unusually severe, though even small problems can prevent people from voting and bigger ones could be on the way as people get off work and crowd polling places closing as soon as a couple of hours from now. Here’s an overview of what we’ve seen so far:

• The biggest story is that this is the first presidential election since a Supreme Court decision removed important protections of the Voting Rights Act, leading to hundreds of poll closures around the country. The full impact of those changes probably won’t be clear until all the votes are counted. It probably exacerbated long lines, already a big problem in 2012. At least the weather isn’t likely to dissuade people from voting. Long lines and polling-place closures have a much bigger effect on vote totals than voter fraud.

• Google is monitoring searches for early signs of trouble spots — the search giant is calling this an experiment. Among swing states, there have been surges in searches related to inactive voters and provisional ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina.

• There have been reports of attempted voter intimidation. In Coral Springs, Florida, police moved Trump voters who were blocking entrances to the polls. In East Lansing, Michigan, a man tried to stop two women wearing hijabs from voting.

• Philadelphia Republicans are objecting to their inspectors being denied access to polling stations, though the city’s DA says all is well.

• Eric Trump is among the people who violated laws in some states against posting photos of your completed ballot.

• There’s lots of confusion about what constitutes illegal voting or polling-place behavior — for example, a Republican operative tailed a bus carrying Philadelphia voters to the polls, which is completely legal.

• Neither of the nation’s two biggest cities are in swing states, but New York and Los Angeles both had widespread voting snafus.

You can read more about voting problems at Electionland and, for coverage of the South, Scalawag.

Assuming a Clinton win tonight, Democrats are likely to pick up several state legislatures across the country. If that happens, one of the more likely to flip control would be Colorado’s Senate, currently controlled by Republicans by an 18-17 majority. Colorado’s statehouse usually doesn’t attract a great deal of national attention; it functions relatively well and hasn’t suffered a great deal of shutdowns or scandals. But here’s something new: It is one of the most rapidly polarizing legislatures in the nation. According to Boris Shor’s research, Colorado now rivals California for the title of most polarized state legislature. Should the Democrats achieve unified control of the state government today, that could mean considerable leftward movement by the state in the near future. This would fuel even more anger among the state’s active Republicans.

In this era of partisanship, there’s one issue that unites both Democrats and Republicans representing my community in western Colorado — the exorbitant price of health insurance premiums for plans purchased on the state insurance exchange. Health insurance premiums can cost as much as 50 percent more in Colorado’s resort communities and rural western areas compared to the state’s urban areas. The higher costs are the result of higher fees charged by providers, who have less competition than providers in urban areas. I know firsthand: I live in Delta County, a rural area of western Colorado, and the monthly premiums on my ACA plan are rising 48 percent next year, making them more costly than my mortgage. About 85 percent of people who buy their own ACA plans receive subsidies, but for many of those who don’t, the cost is quickly climbing out of reach. I’ve talked to a lot of self-insured people in my community who are opting out because they can’t afford the premiums. There are no solutions in sight. A study released by the Colorado Division of Insurance in August concluded that insurance costs in the state’s most expensive regions could fall by about 20 percent if the state was consolidated into a single insurance region. But if that happened, people in the more populous urban areas of Denver and Boulder would see their rates climb by around 9 percent, making the idea politically unfeasible. The problem of rising premiums isn’t unique to Colorado. The Kaiser Family Foundation has found that premiums next year are rising as much as 145 percent in some areas.

Major cities with the biggest increases in ACA monthly premiums

CITY	% INCREASE	2016 PRICE	2017 PRICE
Phoenix	145	$207	$507
Birmingham, Ala.	71	288	492
Oklahoma City	67	295	493

What makes premiums so expensive in certain areas? A lack of competition for services and insurance providers. That problem is only getting worse.

Percentage of ACA enrollees with a choice of insurance providers

YEAR	3 OR MORE INSURERS	2 OR MORE	SINGLE INSURER
2016	85	12	2
2017	57	22	21