According to a report from the Washington Post, “Voting glitches were reported Tuesday as Virginians headed to the polls to select a U.S. senator and vote on an array of congressional candidates and local issues. The elections also put Virginia’s new voter identification law to the test, and voter rights groups were monitoring polling places. The new requirements tripped up some voters in the early going. Rose Mansfield, spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Elections, said there were problems in some parts of the state early Tuesday with the way voting machines were displaying candidates’ names.”
Large Font Leads to Wrong Candidate Being Clicked
Apparently, as election officials explained, the font on the touch screen voting machines had been made extra large in order to make it easier for voters to see. Unfortunately, this had the unpleasant effect of reducing the space between the names of the candidates, thus when the voter went to “click” the name of his or her chosen candidate, the wrong name was entered “by mistake.” According to Mansfield, this problem happened many times across several jurisdictions, but was corrected.
Other Machines Showing Different Selection
In other “glitches,” voting machines in both Newport News and Virginia Beach were reported to have been experiencing “technical difficulties” of a different nature. The Department of Elections was notified of this in the afternoon on Tuesday. After making their choice of which candidate they wanted to vote for, voters noticed that the machine showed a different selection. The offending machines were reportedly taken out of service. State Senator Jeffrey McWaters (R- Virginia Beach posted the following video showing the malfunctioning machines.
Voter Machine Glitches or Voter Fraud?
It is important to note that the reported glitches all seemed to being favor of the Democratic party. Unfortunately, these Virginia cases were not the only ones reported so far. One cannot help but wonder just how this could possible happen with something as serious as an election. Election officials were happy to report that voting was not delayed by these issues, but should it have been?In some of these cases, election officials were not even notified of a problem until the afternoon. How many wrong votes were entered before the offending machines were removed?
This is by far not the first election where voter fraud was alleged, and yet these former elections carried on and the elected officials just happened to be in the party which was favored by the “glitches.” Many Americans, men and women, fought for their right to vote…so we should definitely fight to make sure that our vote counts where we wanted it to.
