This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Voters around the US fought long lines, broken machines, power outages and even a surprise foreclosure to cast their ballots, with election watchers reporting a surge in turnout anyway.

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Voting rights advocates have sued Georgia, one of the states experiencing some of the biggest disruptions and longest waits. The lawsuit claims the Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, the secretary of state who controversially oversees the voting process, has “used the official powers of his office to interfere in the election to benefit himself and his political party and disadvantage his opponents”.

There were suggestions that in some cases voter ID laws and suppression attempts may actually have motivated people to vote. Last minute canvassers in Georgia for the Democrats were among those citing voter suppression attempts to get out their vote.

Mother Jones reported that 70,000 people in North Dakota, including 5,000 Native Americans, lacked the ID they needed after a controversial change requiring street addresses. But the Native American Rights Fund told the magazine that turnout at the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation had been “very high” after the tribe worked “around the clock” to get people new ID papers.

Still, the overwhelming story was one of people struggling to cast their ballot. A county judge in Georgia ordered three precincts to stay open late after machines malfunctioned. Even Kemp himself had problems when his card was marked invalid as he tried to vote, according to a local reporter.

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In Snellville, Georgia, voters took turns sitting in children’s chairs as they waited for hours, according to the Associated Press, and in Atlanta, people waited in the rain in a line at one site that snaked around the building.

Both parties cast the election as a referendum on Donald Trump, driving voters to congested polling sites.

The voters’ advocacy group the Lawyers’ Committee on Civil Rights Under Law said it received nearly 30,000 calls on its election protection hotline as of 8pm, far more than is typical for a midterm election.

“The frequency and severity of the complaints make clear that we have significant work to do to repair our broken election system,” said Kristen Clarke, the group’s president. “Complaints from voters concerned malfunctioning voting equipment, long line[s], inaccurate information shared by poll workers on ID requirements and voter intimidation in some communities.”

Clarke said the election problems underscore a need to address systemic issues, particularly barriers to minority voters.

Campaigners, however, welcomed news from Florida, which restored the right to vote to 1.4 million people by reversing a law which banned anyone with a former felony conviction from voting. Maryland voted for an amendment which will allow residents to register to vote and cast their ballot on the same day. North Carolina and Arkansas also passed measures which should make it easier for people to vote in the future.

In an election year marked by racial hostility, some voters said they saw it at the polls too.

The Houston Chronicle reported a white poll worker was charged with misdemeanor criminal assault after an alleged altercation with a black voter. In Dodge City, Kansas, which moved its sole polling station outside city limits, a Los Angeles Times reporter noted the turnout he saw did not match the demographics of the city, which is 59% Hispanic.

Many voting difficulties were logistical or technical.

In Maricopa county, Arizona, poll workers arrived to find a site padlocked with a foreclosure notice posted. The county saw computer shutdowns too. Tempe voters had pizza delivered while they waited in lengthy lines, the Arizona Republic reported.

Democrats in Louisiana called for polling places that reportedly opened late to allow voters in for an extra hour.

Bad weather across much of the country didn’t help.

Voters in New York City encountered broken ballot scanners that left them in long lines in the rain. Machines in North Carolina were having trouble reading larger-than-usual ballots thanks to humidity.

Power outages caused by high winds in Trumbull county in north-east Ohio left 21 locations in the dark, one journalist reported, with voters filling out paper ballots with flashlights until electricity was restored. Blackouts in Knox county in eastern Tennessee knocked out eight of 79 locations.

With 37 states and the District of Columbia using early voting, many more people cast their ballots that way than four years ago.

Some civil rights organizations also promised greater efforts over the next two years to fight voter ID laws.

Spread the Vote, an organization which helps people without ID to get on the ballot, said it would expand its operations from five states to 12 states as of 2019, Axios reported.