Technical issues are often hard to avoid, especially come election time. Faulty machines and old equipment cause headaches for county officials trying to organize and run their local voting booths. But, Anderson Livsey Elementary School in Snellville, GA may have just won the award for most embarrassing technical glitch yet. Voters were prevented from casting their ballots because, according to the school, the machines ran out of batteries and power cords.
NBC News has confirmed that the issue at Anderson Livsey Elementary in Snellville, GA was indeed a lack of power cords. Gwinnett County Director of Communications Joe Sorenson tells @NBCNews “the machine was not supplied power and was running on battery & the battery ran out” ?? https://t.co/YFa45nihXs
— Ayman Mohyeldin (@AymanM) November 6, 2018
Oh brother.
The NBC reporter covering the story later added that officials told him the power had been restored.
Okay. I know I said earlier that the Snellville polling station may have had the worst excuse ever for inoperable voting machines. But then Detroit said hold my beer. Voters who showed up at Martin Luther King Jr. High School to do their civic duty Tuesday were turned away because...election workers could not locate the voting machines.
Voters turned away at Detroit polling site due to missing voting machines: report https://t.co/uG5gE2GKNQ pic.twitter.com/RIOWcuXopD
— The Hill (@thehill) November 6, 2018
"According to the news station, the polling site was temporarily closed off to voters because election workers were unable to locate the voting machines," The Hill piece reads.
The mystery was solved when election workers realized the machines were in a closet on the other side of the school that they did not have access to.
Hey, at least Anderson Livsey Elementary had voting machines.
There have been other voting glitches reported across the country. In South Carolina, voters said their votes were being changed. Officials admitted their equipment was pretty dated. In Chandler, Arizona, election workers were informed that the building they were going to use had been foreclosed overnight. They were eventually moved to a nearby site. Meanwhile, New York City has been plagued with dysfunctional scanners. Voters in Tennessee had to fill out paper ballots because of a power outage. But officials could hardly be blamed for that. Storms had swept through the state.