Some talk radio shows in San Diego are getting lots of callers from San Diego reporting major problems in voting: long lines, electronic voting machines that don’t work, people leaving because they have to go to work. (See our review of THIS DVD).
Some voters have reportedly asked for paper ballots and are filling them out. A judge reportedly has said paper ballots don’t have to be counted until Thursday.
Apparently the complaints are coming from voters on the right and on the left. Several callers on one station said they have voted at the same precincts for years and have never seen it so chaotic.
The question that will be debated if reports like this come from throughout the country today will be whether this is due to incompetence or political design. That’ll depend on the number of reports such as this and if there is a pattern.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.