WASHINGTON, November 6 (RIA Novosti) - As Americans headed to the polls Tuesday to vote for their next president, they were met by a range of obstacles and hassles, including long lines, technical snafus, and shortages of personnel and voting machines at polling stations.
Voters up and down the US East Coast on Tuesday morning said they weathered bottlenecks at the polling booths—standing for hours in chilly temperatures across much of the region—to cast their ballot in the presidential election.
“The line was insane,” said Mitchell Banks, 53, a travel agent who arrived at an Arlington, Virginia, community center to cast his ballot Tuesday morning but gave up temporarily after waiting three hours. “We’re hoping to come back later when the line is smaller,” Banks told RIA Novosti.
Banks added that he is lucky enough to work from home, unlike many voters who are forced to take several hours off from work in order to cast their ballots.
“It’s a terrible statement on how our system is run that we have to wait in two-to-three-hour lines to cast our vote,” said Banks, who added that he expected to wait at most an hour at the polling station.
One woman at the Arlington polling station berated an election site official for downplaying the amount of time voters would have to wait.
“You all should be more accurate in what you’re telling people about the time in line,” the woman said. “The hour-and-a-half they told me is not true.”
The woman subsequently went home to nurse her baby before she was able to vote.
In the northeastern state of Connecticut, meanwhile, voters went to the polls amid the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy last week.
“This morning, it was chaos,” Diana Taylor, an election judge working at a polling station in the town of Newton, Connecticut, told USA Today. "We had trouble with the new electronic system—just trying to find people. If we can’t find people in the electronic system, we look them up in another electronic system and then a paper system."
In the tightly contested Midwestern state of Ohio, whose 18 electoral votes could be crucial in determining the outcome of the presidential election, vote monitors reported technical problems with ballot scanners in several different counties, Politico reported.
Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney was scheduled to hold two campaign events in Ohio to drum up last-second votes in the state, while Democratic incumbent Barack Obama was spending Election Day at his home in Chicago, Illinois.
In Florida, another key state in the race between Obama and Romney for the White House, hundreds—and possibly thousands—of voters received automated calls from a local election official informing them that they had until Wednesday evening to cast their ballots, despite the fact that the polls close Tuesday evening, The Washington Post reported.
“We stopped it immediately when we found out about it,” a spokeswoman for the election official told the newspaper, adding that her office sent out a second automated call telling voters to disregard the previous call.
