Georgia suffered major voting machine malfunctions, according to Election Integrity Foundation Chairman Harri Hursti. Voting machines were “incorrectly loaded,” according to WSB-TV. Hursti said there were a variety of malfunctions.
In Spalding County, there was “100 percent failure in the beginning,” Hursti said. “People came ready to wait but…..clearly, they were frustrated.”
Voters were forced to use provisional ballots for hours.
Human error was blamed – the wrong database was loaded – but Hursti said it was “too early to say what the cause might have been.”
“One location took 5 hours to come online,” Dan Webber, also of the Election Integrity Foundation, told me. “Issues were with poll books and ballot marking devices, and in one place, scanners. Poll books in certain areas were not creating the vote cards so they were using workarounds.”
Georgia spent about $100 million on new voting machines this election cycle, after a federal judge ruled earlier that its archaic systems weren’t safe. Earlier, I wrote about last-minute software upgrades to its systems that election integrity organizations challenged in court. The state suffered a technology meltdown during its primary election, too.
Hursti’s was an expert witness in a lawsuit filed to force the state to be ready with a paper ballot backup; state officials fought the measure. So polling places impacted by the glitch weren’t prepared, he said.
“Why the state was fighting tool and nail not to have a plan B, was bizarre,” Hursti said.
Leave a Reply