Virginia: E-Vote Machine Problems; Optical Vote Scanners Jamming Due to Rain; Email Hoax at George Mason University

Dry your hands before you vote, says Virginia Board of Elections spokeswoman.

FBI investigates GMU hoax vote email.

The Virginia Board of Elections has had multiple reports of jamming of the optical scanning of ballots which have been voted in several "isolated" parts of the state.

"Ballots are getting wet and affecting the machines. You need to be sure to dry your hands before completing your ballot" said spokewoman Susan Pollard. A wet ballot could be unreadable, or could jam the optical scanner which records the votes as they are deposited intothe ballot box.

There were also reports of failures of electronic pollbooks [pdf - Diebold "Using Electronic Pollbooks"] , in which all voter identification and other data are kept. Replacement pollbooks are being sent to those precincts reporting pollbook failures. It is reported that there are paper backups available for those in precincts in which the e-pollbooks have failed.

According to the Washington Post:

The Board also reported that all but three of the state's 2,349 precincts opened their polls on time this morning at 6 a.m. Those precincts -- in Virginia Beach, Mount Olive, and Richmond -- all were up and running later this morning. Pollard said two of those precincts opened late due to unspecified "human error."

Election Protection, the nonpartisan group working to safeguard and oversee problems in voting nationwide, reports more widespread problems in Virginia. For example, at one location in Henrico County, five e-voting machines failed. Voters had to wait up to four hours for the machines to become functional; there were no replacement paper ballots available.

In one town in the far western part of the state, voting machines didn't offer a full slate of choices in a state Senate race; some voters voted before the problem was discovered.

Again from the Washington Post:

"There has been a wide range of problems, ranging from machines not booting up to machines not bringing up the full slate of choices," said Karen Newman, of the Fair Elections Legal Network. "There have been problems with optical scan machines, apparently from getting wet. In Chesterfield, there were a number of problems with marked ballots being improperly fed through the machine. And there's some human error as well."

The coalition has been lobbying Virginia to extend its voting hours until 9 p.m. to accommodate voters affected by the problems, but so far to no avail. All voters who are in line by 7 p.m. will have the chance to vote, and advocates are urging voters to stay in line, even if the lines are hours long.

"Long lines were expected in this election, but widespread equipment problems have thrown fuel on the fire in Virginia," said Barbara Arnwine, of Election Protection. ***

[T]he Campaign Legal Center has noted problems in Fairfax County, at the Glenmar Park School, Clermone Elementary School, Reston Christ Lutheran Church and Holmes Elementary School.

Gerry Herbert, of the Campaign Legal Center, told us that there also have been problems in Newport News, Virginia Beach, Mechanicsville, Lynchburg and other locations around the state. In Accomack, on the Eastern Shore, persistent witnesses said that the presidential ballot never showed up at the fire hall, and the three times they went to vote the presidency screen didn't show up on the machine.

(Emphasis added.)

The Virginia Board of Elections is reportedly receiving an "unprecedented number of calls" regarding today's voting. Earlier this morning, many calls to the Board were being dropped in mid-conversation. Voters were being urged to go to the Board's website: www.sbe.virginia.gov, to obtain information regarding polling locations, registration status and other related information. Live chat with staff members is also available from that site.

**
Meanwhile, someone has hacked into the email system at George Mason University overnight, and sent out an email to 30,000 students and 5,000 school employees "from the office of Provost Petern N. Stearns" advising that election day had been moved to November 5. The messges were sent to the university's three campuses in Northern Virginia, in an apparent attempt to hold down student voting there.

GMU is reportedly working with University police and the FBI to determine the source:

"Somebody was able to access a closed list, and the question we're trying to answer is how was that person able to get in there and do that," said Daniel Walsch, a George Mason spokesman. "We are working with authorities to try to locate the source, and hopefully we can identify the source, as we are taking it seriously and will prosecute if we find the person."

Stearns, the provost, sent out a message to the University community shortly before 1 a.m. to try to debunk what he called "troubling rumors" about the election. He wrote that the election is on Nov. 4 for both political parties and that it is untrue that any student jeopardizes their financial aid package by voting, a reference to earlier hoax e-mails that have circulated.

(Graphic source: Radford.edu. For educational, not-for-profit use only.)