[Rhodes22-list] How's the voting going out there?

[Lowe, Rob]

Well, things are not going well in the E1 precinct, where the majority
of the on campus Virginia Tech students are voting.  This is where the
local registrar, a Republican, tried to ban on campus students from
voting locally until the state board of elections told him he was
violating state election laws.  He was asked, repeatedly, to move the
polling place to a more accessible location.  

>From the local news report:

More than 5,600 people, mainly Virginia Tech students, are registered to
vote at precinct E1 in Blacksburg, Virginia (Montgomery County). That
number is nearly double what the state law allows for polling stations
and the lack of an additional polling station is causing substantial
delays. In addition, the polling place is 6.5 miles away from campus at
a tiny church located off the main road. There is no street sign marking
the turn off to the one lane road. There are 30 parking spots for the
thousands of voters expected to turn up at precinct E1.

The vigilant folks here at Election Protection headquarters are telling
us that large numbers of Virginia voters have been turned away from the
polls this morning. Several precincts opened late and quickly had ballot
shortages. At some, not all the machines were working; at others, none
of them were working. The group's legal volunteers are learning more by
the minute as calls come in from voters--so take this all with a grain
of salt for now--but word here is that more than a dozen precincts have
been experiencing serious problems in the Commonwealth. The number of
voters affected, according to a group spokesman, is "significant."


More than a thousand frustrated Virginians have called to complain this
morning. One widely reported blunder: Workers at some of the state's
malfunctioning precincts have been giving cleanly registered voters
provisional ballots instead of paper ballots, most likely because they
ran out of the paper ones. (Provisional ballots are meant for voters
whose eligibility has been called into question.) "Over the last hour,
we're continuing to get these problems in Virginia," says Jon Greenbaum,
the coalition's legal director. And then there's this, from a Rock the
Vote rep: The polling precinct for Virginia Tech students in Blacksburg
was moved to a church that sits on an unmarked road six miles off
campus.