14:53 EST Tuesday
Duval County precincts report minor problems
Paul Ivice American City Business Journals
Through midday, few problems have been reported at Duval County polling places.
There were scattered reports of optical scanning machines failing, but technicians with the Supervisor of Elections Office quickly responded to repair or replace those vote-counting machines, said Mike Tolbert, a spokesman for the Supervisor of Elections Office.
At the Mary Singleton Senior Citizens Center in Springfield, where poll workers were unable for two hours to get their machine working on primary election day in September, there again was a delay.
"Everything was set up properly but the machine itself would not scan ballots; I had to request another," said A. Wellington Barlow, a Jacksonville attorney who was serving as precinct clerk. This was one of 25 precincts that Supervisor of Elections John Stafford had identified as a problem in September and replaced all or most of the poll workers.
Barlow said 25 to 35 people completed their ballots before the voting machine was replaced at 8:10 a.m.
Sign up to receive free daily business updates by email every weekday afternoon.
Use Search Watch to watch for related topics, companies.
Receive free Industry News via email. Choose from 46 different industries.
Those voters were invited back to watch their ballot get fed into the machine at 7 p.m. Barlow said it remained a potential problem because if the machine still rejected a ballot, the voter could not be given another one.
"I think a lot of people called first" to make sure the polling place was open, Barlow said.
Other problems with voting machines were attributed to voters using the wrong kind of marker on the ballots. It appeared that in some cases at the St. Paul A.M.E. Church on the Northside, the marker's ink would bleed through the paper ballot, causing the optical scanner to reject it.
Miki Ahmed-Jefferson, another first-time precinct clerk, said those voters were given another ballot.
Mike Tolbert, a spokesman for the Supervisor of Elections Office, said five out of 285 vote-counting machines had malfunctioned and were replaced. Otherwise, "everything seems to be going smoothly," he said.
Turnout appeared light early in the day. Ahmed-Jefferson estimated turnout at her Northside precinct at 20 percent by noon. At 11 a.m., another Northside precinct had seen fewer than 75 of its 968 registered voters.
Though not being scrutinized as closely as the voting in Dade County, Duval County's polling places were being watched by Justice Department attorneys and election watchers from the People for the American Way Foundation.
Andrew Gillum, field coordinator for the foundation, said this election was going much more smoothly than the primary. Jorge Martinez, a spokesman in Washington for the Justice Department, said shortly before noon than no problems had been reported to him from Duval County.
http://jacksonville.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/stories/2002/11/04/daily19.html