Voting Problems in Louisiana

I know that there were problems in the New Orleans area involving voting machines. I know some of the machines broke down for part of the day. Beyond the problems of the machines breaking down were there enough voting machines on election day, especially in the minority precints? Has the Secretary of State said anything about fixing the voting problems before the 2006 election?

He is currently shopping for new voting machines but rejects the optical scan requests stating that they were involved in the Florida fiasco.

One of the other voting problems threads here has a link to the voting complaints reports. There were less than 1000 in Louisiana yet over 500 of those were in New Orleans. NOLA is around 78% african american so "minority areas" pretty much applies to most of the parish. I was at Abramson HS on election day where there were 3 precincts voting. The poll was located in the cafeteria and the lines zig-zagged up and down the long tables. Waits were anywhere from 2-4 hours while I was there. Many people were forced to leave due to personal responsibilities to family ect. People are definitely being disenfranchised there. The voters waiting in line told me that it has always been that way and it's especially during a presidentail election . Only one precinct there was having that long of a wait and it was (in my opinion) 96-100% black. If this has been such a chronic problem, why has nothing been done about it? This, and many other precincts will need to be split in order to better serve the community.

Also, I'd like to note that the problems in this precinct were not due to lack of or faulty machines. THree machines were allocated yet usually only one would be occupied at a time. The commissioners simply could not enter that amount of names into the system quickly enough. I believe the Commissioners were doing the best they could but were just understaffed and overwhelmed.

To both collect and publicize these reports. Check out www.praeses.net/cassie/LouisianaCounts (we're in the process of buying LaCounts.org) to see what we've done.

www.LaCounts.org

Please have a look, let me know what you think should be added, or critique it. We want to frame this not as "vote fraud" but "election reform" and present it as non-partisan as possible.

*if you haven't already*

http://www.createforum.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=6&mforum=laprogressives