Advocates warn of thousands of reports of voting problems nationwide

Source: Boston Herald

WASHINGTON -- Voting rights advocates today are flagging numerous reports of voter intimidation, malfunctioning machines, late-opening polling places and other problems, particularly in minority communities from the Bay State to Florida — and are calling on Congress to plug holes they say were left in the federal Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This election may be the most chaotic election faced by voters of color and voters with disabilities in the last 50 years,” Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told reporters at a briefing at the national call center for Election Protection, a project by a coalition of voting rights groups. “It’s a perfect storm of voter disenfranchisement.”

By 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time today, more than 5,500 reports of voting problems had come into the organization’s 23 regional locations. That puts them on pace to receive as many as 175,000 calls by the time polls close tonight, officials said.

The number and severity of the reports outpaces the 2012 and 2008 election year, a rise the advocates attribute to the 2013 high court ruling striking down parts of the law requiring some states to seek Justice Department preclearance of voting law changes.

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