A look at some of the voter troubles in battleground states:
COLORADO:
Republican Party officials accused Democrats of violating election rules at scattered sites around Colorado. State GOP spokesman Peter DeMarco said a lawyer for the Democratic Party showed up at an Eagle County precinct with a list of registered Republican voters and a plan to challenge all of them. Democrats admitted it was true.
“There was one of our members of our voter protection team who, unbeknown to us, did file a blanket challenge,” said Steve Haro, spokesman for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. “It ended up failing immediately. No voter was turned away. That attorney has been taken off our team.”
Officials with the Election Protection Coalition, a voter-rights group, also said some voters in a predominantly black neighborhood north of Denver found papers on their doorsteps giving them the wrong address for their precinct.
FLORIDA:
In the Palm Beach County town of Boynton Beach, a minor power failure may have caused nearly 40 votes to be lost. The nine machines at the Cascades clubhouse precinct lost power and needed to be rebooted, said poll clerk Joyce Gold.
“We’re going to monitor it very closely,” Gold said. “If the numbers don’t add up, there’s no way those votes wouldn’t be lost forever.”
In Broward County, 21 iVotronics touch-screen machines developed problems during the day; at least one had shown candidates not chosen by the voter on its final review screen.
Two precincts in Tallahassee reported problems with optical scanning machines, which record votes by scanning marked paper ballots. In Volusia County, workers were reprocessing 13,244 ballots from early voting that could not be counted because a memory card failed Monday.
OHIO:
A federal judge in Toledo ruled that Ohio voters who did not receive absentee ballots on time could cast provisional ballots. A woman had sued earlier in the day on behalf of such voters. The decision reversed a directive by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell.
It was unclear how many voters were affected but the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights, a San Francisco-based group that helped filed the lawsuit, said it had spoken to several people who hadn’t received requested ballots.
Early in the day, mechanical problems with punch-card voting machines near Cincinnati meant up to 40 voters were not able to cast ballots.
PENNSYLVANIA:
Philadelphia Republians sought more time to challenge absentee ballots cast by Democrats. Their lawsuit demanded that the city turn over a list of every Philadelphian who had received an absentee ballot, and then delay counting any of their votes until at least Nov. 5. GOP attorney Bruce Marks said the delay would give his party time to investigate whether any ballots were cast by ineligible people.
Meanwhile, a lawyer for Kerry’s campaign in Pennsylvania said some people were prevented from voting when at least a dozen Allegheny County precincts ran out of provisional ballots.
WISCONSIN:
Authorities said the tires were slashed on 20 vans that Republicans had hired to help get out the vote in Milwaukee. GOP spokesman Chris Lato said it was not clear who was responsible. Vandals spray-painted the words “Illegitimate Democracy” overnight Tuesday on the outside of the state GOP headquarters at Madison, Lato said.
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