Happy Election Day! This afternoon I’ve been tracking reports of technical glitches with voting equipment, and while there have been a handful, that's to be expected.
A few technical difficulties happen every election. (I wrote a whole story about it!) As Lawrence Norden, director of the election reform program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me: “No election is perfect. There are always going to be some technical problems.” And no, it’s not evidence of a hack or some kind of meddling. It’s just the reality when we have 10,000 different jurisdictions, all using different technology on the same day, and some voters using new equipment for the very first time.
There have been timely, effective fixes in each of the cases I’ve found so far. In Franklin County, Ohio, election officials weren’t able to sync electronic poll books with an online database, so they switched to paper poll books to check in voters. A similar fix was made in Spalding County, Georgia after their voting machines went down — voters were able to cast ballots on paper until the machines were back up and running.
And these few examples are the outliers. The vast majority of polling places today have had no problems. Instead, there have been lots of reports of no lines and smooth sailing:
https://twitter.com/sabbryson/status/1323686800213291010