Ready or not, big voting day is Tuesday

Thanks to unprecedented turnout for Georgia’s advance voting, 2 million people won’t have to go to the polls on Election Day.

Yet, so much could go so wrong.

If high turnout projections hold, another 3 million people may show up at Georgia polling places Tuesday, more than ever before on a single Election Day in the state’s history.

Some precincts could be swamped. Election officials may find they’ve placed too few voting machines in busy polling places. Newly registered voters may not be listed on computerized rolls; they could be forced to cast “provisional” ballots that might or might not be counted.

Any one of those factors could complicate Tuesday’s election, leaving people waiting in line well into the night, preventing some voters from casting ballots or rendering others’ votes invalid, according to state and county officials, poll watchers and interest groups.

“There are so many things that could make this thing difficult that it just drives you insane,” said Doug Lewis, executive director of the National Association of Election Officials, based in Houston.

“We are the best prepared we have ever been,” Lewis said. “And yet at the same time, I can tell you that is like saying Galveston was prepared for the hurricane that was going to hit them.”

Voting rights groups are watching Georgia and other states for irregularities. Some groups claim the state’s law requiring voters to present a government-issued photographic identification card at the polling place could cause confusion. Others suggest Georgia hasn’t put enough voting machines into African-American precincts where an unusually high turnout is expected.

Secretary of State Karen Handel, Georgia’s chief elections officer, said the state and counties are as well prepared as possible.

But Handel acknowledged the state faces many variables that could overwhelm any plans: millions of voters, ballots packed with dozens of races and more than 3,000 polling places supervised by 15,000 poll workers whose average age is 72.

“Any time you have close to 5 million people doing anything you are going to have an issue,” Handel said last week. “We want to do our level best to address an issue so it doesn’t become a crisis.”

Florida nightmare

For many officials, this election is haunted by the ghost of Katherine Harris. As Florida’s secretary of state in 2000, Harris was at once reviled and ridiculed as she halted a recount of contested ballots and declared George W. Bush — for whose campaign she had served as an honorary chairwoman — the winner by 537 votes.

The Florida dispute centered on the tens of thousands of ballots that appeared not to include a vote for president. But the under-voting problem was even more pronounced in Georgia. No vote for president registered on 94,000 Georgia ballots — a higher percentage than in Florida.

The next year, Georgia distributed 19,000 touch-screen voting machines among its 159 counties, and by the 2004 presidential election, the statewide under-voting rate decreased to less than 1/2 of 1 percent.

State officials initially suggested counties deploy one machine for every 200 voters. The counties now own about 27,000 machines, Handel said, one for every 207 registered voters.

But the average doesn’t necessarily hold up in individual precincts.

The NAACP Voter Fund issued a statement last week alleging that Georgia isn’t putting enough machines in African-American precincts, where Barack Obama’s candidacy is expected to inspire record turnouts.

Handel bristled at that claim.

“I don’t think an interest group has the expertise or knowledge to make that decision,” she said. “It’s important to look at motivations of some of these organizations. … Organizations are out looking at things that can support litigation if they have issues with what the ultimate result is of any election.”

In a recent letter to a Georgia NAACP official, Handel vowed her office would investigate complaints of voter intimidation and other irregularities.

In the interview, however, Handel said deciding how many machines to install at particular polling places is “a county function.”

In DeKalb County, for instance, officials consider past turnout and “traffic habits” when assigning machines to precincts, said Maxine Daniels, assistant director of registration and elections.

Gwinnett County is keeping 260 of its 1,840 voting machines on standby in case of exceptional turnout in particular precincts.

“We are prepared to be at the polls late,” said Lynn Ledford, Gwinnett’s director of registration and elections, “and we are prepared to count ballots throughout the night and the following morning — and beyond, if necessary.”

Identifying voters

If advance voting is a guide, Tuesday’s turnout may be overwhelming.

Already, 35 percent of registered voters have cast ballots. If this year’s turnout reaches the 2004 level of 77 percent, another 2.3 million people will vote Tuesday.

But election officials in many counties predict that 90 percent of registered voters will go to the polls. If that’s correct, almost 3 million voters will cast ballots Tuesday; in 2004, votes totaled 3.2 million, including 420,000 cast in advance.

Many will be voting for the first time. Georgia added more than half a million voters to the rolls this year. At the same time, this is the first presidential election in which Georgia will enforce a law requiring voters to present a photo ID. These factors, many election watchers said, could exacerbate problems at the polls.

Any voter who doesn’t have a valid ID will be given a paper ballot labeled “provisional.” The voter must present an acceptable ID to the county elections registrar within two days, or the ballot won’t be counted.

Provisional ballots also will be given to voters whose names don’t appear on the rolls for their precinct, either because they registered just before the deadline or they aren’t really registered at all.

Handel said she expects few problems from provisional balloting or from the photo ID requirement. In this year’s primaries, just 7,541 of more than 2 million voters cast provisional ballots. More than 5,000 of those voters were not listed on the rolls; just 409 couldn’t present an acceptable identification card.

But glitches may have kept some eligible voters from casting ballots. At a polling place on the Morehouse College campus in Atlanta, dozens of voters, most of them students, were required to cast provisional ballots for the primaries.

Poll workers mistakenly refused to accept students’ out-of-state driver’s licenses, said Mark Henderson, a Fulton County election official.

Counties set their own rules for assessing the validity of paper ballots. Statewide, officials accepted 49 percent of provisional votes in the primaries. But that number varied widely.

Some counties may reject the hand-marked ballots because of stray pencil lines, while others may try to decipher a voter’s intent, said Randy Evans, a member of the state election board.

Provisional ballots could be critical in several state legislative races, Evans said, especially where districts cross county lines.

“You could have the same district but have different counties count them differently,” Evans said. “In a race where the margin could be less than 100 votes, and we’re talking thousands and thousands of provisional ballots, you can see why it will be pretty high-stakes poker.”

For now, election officials say they are focused on what they can control: setting up polling places to help get as many voters in and out as quickly as possible.

The secretary of state’s office has told counties that no voter should have to wait in line more than two hours.

Handel, who is overseeing her first presidential election, said she’s not losing sleep fretting over possible breakdowns on Election Day.

Still, “Elections are run by people,” she said, “and people are human beings.”

Staff writers Heather Vogell and Mary Lou Pickel contributed to this article.