People Are Trying To Vote Today. How’s It Going So Far?
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.