Election line shame

Gross incompetence or criminal malfeasance. Those are the only conclusions one can reach when looking at places where people have to wait 3, 4, 5 or more hours in order to cast their votes.

Waits like that are simply inexcusable.

I live in a place that often has healthy turnout. My polling place handles multiple precincts, and there were so many voters today that there was a police officer on duty directing traffic. Yet it didn't take me longer than two minutes to check in and get a paper ballot. My husband, who votes during early peak commuter hours, said there was a longer wait than usual, but it certainly wasn't anything close to an hour.

Contrast that with places in Georgia, where voter registration database systems were sluggish or crashing during early voting, causing lines of 4-6 hours.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, the law only requires one machine per 750 registered voters. Do the math: With a 60 percent turnout and polls open 13 hours, you're expecting each machine to handle more than 30 voters per hour. That assumes people can each vote in less than two minutes on complicated touch-screen systems. Add in the fact that you never see an even distribution of voters throughout the day, so during peak times, the expectation is that voters will be even quicker than two minutes.

For those places that insist on systems other than paper ballots, it's time for some serious service level agreements. Vendors need to be told maximum allowable wait times in contracts -- just like maximum allowable downtime -- and be financially penalized if their systems malfunction and cause unacceptable delays in voting.

What's that, you say? Causes may be poor training of election officials or voter errors and not the machines themselves? Well, those are also system problems. If vendors can't guarantee that touch-screen machines with voter-verified paper trails will work better than optical scanning of paper ballots, then it's time to ditch the touch screens. As for systems without paper backup, they need to be outlawed.

See our complete coverage of Election Technology 2008, including a state-by-state map and an interactive database of incident reports.