The New York Times reports that, due to the high volume of voters expected and new and different voting formats, problems at the polls are anticipated. They are not expected to be catastrophic to the level of Florida in 2000, however.
One of the primary “new” tools being used is a good old pencil and a paper ballot, which gets scanned through a machine either at the local voting location, or in a central office for the county. Concerns are similar to those you may remember from taking standardized tests in grade school: not filling in the circles well enough comes in at the top of the list. Ian Urbina writes:
Millions of voters will encounter an unfamiliar low-tech landscape at the polls on Tuesday. About half of all voters will vote in a way that is different from what they did in the last presidential election, and most will use paper ballots rather than the touch-screen machines that have caused concern among voting experts.
But the change does not guarantee a smooth election day, as the nation’s voting system remains untested for what is expected to be an unprecedented turnout. Six years after the largest federal overhaul in how elections are run, voting experts are still predicting machine and ballot shortages in several swing states and late tallies on election night.
Two-thirds of voters will mark their choice with a pencil on a paper ballot that is counted by an optical scanning machine, a method considered far more reliable and verifiable than touch screens. But paper ballots bring their own potential problems, voting experts say.
The scanners can break down, leading to delays and confusion for poll workers and voters. And the paper ballots of about a third of all voters will be counted not at the polling place but later at a central county location. That means that if a voter has made an error — not filling in an oval properly, for example, a mistake often made by the kind of novice voters who will be flocking to the polls — it will not be caught until it is too late. As a result, those ballots will be disqualified.
Voting rights groups have also filed lawsuits against election officials in Pennsylvania and Virginia, saying they have not stocked enough paper ballots to prepare for the expected turnout.