Voters in several battleground states encountered problems at the polls yesterday with reports of malfunctioning machines, late-opening polling stations and some intimidation.
At the Hollywood Public Library in Hollywood, Florida, there were reports of a hostile group hovering around voters as they entered the facility. In Miami-Dade County, an individual was said to be aggressively using a megaphone and in Jacksonville, an unauthorised poll watcher refused to leave a polling station after being asked to do so by election officials.
Elsewhere in Florida, men in a truck were reported to be driving near polling stations waving the Confederate flag, according to Melanie Campbell, president of the National Coalition of Black Civic Participation.
All the voting machines in Durham, North Carolina, another critical swing state where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are battling for votes, failed to work. And in Georgia the location of several polling stations was moved without notice to voters, said Kristen Clarke, of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
“There is tremendous disruption,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “This may be the most chaotic election faced by voters of colour in the last 50 years.”
This is the first presidential election to be conducted without the full protection afforded by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling limited the ability of the Department of Justice to monitor voting problems while an election was under way. Although the federal presence in many states will be significantly reduced, DoJ officials still have deployed about 500 observers to polling stations around the country.
Problems were also reported in Pennsylvania, where there was not enough assistance for Spanish-language voters. State law there allows for easy challenges to voters’ credentials, leading to “tense exchanges in line”, said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, which has 8,000 volunteers monitoring voting in 28 states.
Wanda Murren, of the Pennsylvania secretary of state’s office, said no significant problems had been encountered. “It’s going quite well,” she said.
Meanwhile the Trump campaign filed a lawsuit against the registrar in Clark County, Nevada, alleging he kept early voting queues open two hours beyond their scheduled close in a move to help Democrats. On Saturday, Nevada Republican chairman Michael McDonald said the polling station was kept open “so a certain group could vote”, an apparent reference to local Latinos.
