As I reported here yesterday, numerous voters complained to voter hotlines yesterday about the process for confirming voter registration. In Georgia, the issue caused extensive delays – two and a half hours and more.

Today I received recordings of some of those calls and am posting them for readers to hear. The hotline only provided voters with 60 seconds to leave their message so some of the callers are cut off mid-complaint.

Georgia has replaced the old paper method of verifying voters with an e-pollbook device made by Diebold Election Systems (Georgia uses a model that is slightly different from the one pictured at right) to verify voter eligibility against the state's voter registration database. The digital devices had serious problems in Maryland in 2006 when they froze and spontaneously booted in every precinct there. Although the Georgia callers complain about the use of these devices, they don't mention any specific technical problems with them.

The first voter calls the verification machines "a joke" and says officials should be "ashamed" for using them. He says that although his precinct had 11 voting machines/booths for casting ballots, only three were being used due to the backup for the verification process, which caused a three-hour wait for voters. He says 1st graders would have done a better job than poll workers were doing.

Other voters complained that there weren't enough e-pollbooks at their precincts, resulting in long waits and voters leaving the line.

The calls came from a separate hotline from the one I wrote about yesterday. This hotline was run by InfoVoter Technologies and was promoted before the election by the NAACP-NVF and the Tom Joyner Morning Show.

According to Harry Cook, vice president of InfoVoter Technologies, they received more than 10,000 calls to the line yesterday. Most of these calls were requests for polling locations and other information. But about 2,000 calls were related to problems at the polls.

Cook provided me with a breakdown of many of the calls that were reporting problems. He broke them down first for Georgia, then for the nation. As you can see, registration verification and I.D. checks were the biggest problems reported:

As of Feb 06 06:49 am ET

Georgia (GA): Coded Complaints by Problem Type Absentee: 47 (8.6%)

Registration: 163 (29.7%)

Poll Access/Identification: 149 (30.7%)

Mechanical: 79 (14.4%)

Provisional Ballots: 5 (0.9%)

Coercion/Intimidation: 9 (1.6%)

Other: 78 (14.2%) Total Coded Calls: 549 United States: Coded Complaints by Problem Type (Total Coded Calls: 1,725 – more calls need to be coded) Absentee: 177 (10.26%)

Registration: 652 (37.80%)

Mechanical: 153 (8.87%)

Provisional Ballots: 10 (0.58%)

Coercion/Intimidation: 20 (1.16%)

Poll Access/ID: 366 (21.22%)

Other: 347 (20.12%) Total Coded Calls: 1,725

See also: