PHOENIX—At a polling center in the master-planned community of Anthem in Arizona’s Maricopa County on Nov. 8, more than 100 people stood in line at 10 a.m. waiting to vote.
Claudia Linehan said she arrived at 6 a.m. hoping to vote early, but learned that a tabulation machine had malfunctioned.
“I was in line [over an hour],” Linehan told The Epoch Times. “It’s terrible. Their machines don’t work. They blamed it on technology.”
Linehan said she watched as election officials tried to put the ballots through the tabulator for scanning.
“They tried it again and turned it over,” she said. “After the third time, they put it down in the adjudication box.”
She said the process, as she saw it happen, didn’t inspire confidence.
“Absolutely none,” said Linehan, who voted “pretty much” a straight Republican ticket.
Anthem voter Basil Fernilos, a conservative activist, said he came to vote at 6:05 a.m., only to find that one of the ballot tabulators didn’t work. An election official told him to return later or vote at another location.
“I won’t vote here,” Fernilos told The Epoch Times.
Tamara Conner of Anthem said, “We did see a couple of glitches, but it worked for us. It seems to be fixed [now].
Conner said she was “kind of surprised” to see so many people standing in line to vote.
“They said it was a two-hour line, but we were in line for about an hour,” she said. “It went quick.”
“It’s not like both of the tabulators in these 20 percent of locations are having these issues. It might only be one.”
Gates said the problem wasn’t preventing people from casting their ballots, saying that voters can deposit their ballots in a drop box to be tabulated later.
