Officials fear delays in tallying ballots
Save for a few sputters in troublesome Ohio, voting appeared to run smoothly in four state primaries that could decide whether Hillary Rodham Clinton abandons her quest to be the first female president.
A bomb threat stopped voting at a middle school in one northeast Ohio precinct for about 90 minutes. After trained dogs found nothing, the polls were reopened. Heavy rain, sleet and ice forced at least 10 precincts to request permission to move, and a few polling spots were running on generators because of power outages.
But election advocates worried that final counts from primaries held Tuesday -- also in Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island -- could be delayed for hours or days, especially in Ohio, where tallying delays have become all too common, as have long waits to vote.
"They know that they're under scrutiny, so they're going to focus on getting it right," said Doug Chapin, director of Electionline.org, a project of the Pew Center for the States. "Given the choice between slowing down to get it right and going faster to get it done, I think they're going to err on the side of caution."
Counting delays in Ohio have ranged from more than a month in the 2004 general election to five days in the 2006 primary, when absentee ballots had to be counted by hand. Especially worrisome to some advocates is Cuyahoga County, the state's most populous, where election officials abruptly ordered the abandonment of electronic voting machines in favor of paper ballots for Tuesday's primary.
"One of the things that is inescapable, is when you've got a paper system, it takes longer to count," Chapin said.
The delegate-rich states of Ohio and Texas are considered the be-all and end-all to Clinton, who's lost the last 11 primaries to Barack Obama, an Illinois senator who hopes to be the first black president.
If she loses both states, and their combined delegate count of 392, her campaign has suggested she will drop out of the presidential race.
Polls across all four states reported heavy turnout Tuesday, with lines forming in some places before dawn. Things appeared calm, except for sporadic glitches in Ohio.
Candice Hoke, director of Cleveland State University's Center for Election Integrity, said volunteer election monitors in Cuyahoga County reported shortages of poll workers in some precincts and nonfunctioning touch-screen machines set aside for disabled voters.
In Franklin County, home to the capital, Columbus, election officials kept polls open late Monday to accommodate huge numbers of early voters.
Voting advocates said Texas' hybrid system of precinct caucuses and private ballots could also delay tallies. Under an arcane set of rules, precinct caucuses, which decide 30 percent of delegates, cannot be held until the polls close at 7 p.m. Anyone in line at that point must be allowed to cast a ballot, however, meaning possible delays.
"The problems are going to be turnout-related," said Nina Perales, an attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund in San Antonio. "Long lines. Long waits."