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Lines, Provisional Ballots Greet Voters on Election Day

Crowds line up around the block for a long wait to vote at the Noyes Elementary School in Northeast Washington, D.C. (Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call)
Crowds line up around the block for a long wait to vote at the Noyes Elementary School in Northeast Washington, D.C. (Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call)

The lines that greeted early morning voters in Virginia, Ohio and Washington, D.C., today seem to have, by many accounts, subsided until people leave work and there’s another influx at the polls.

Some of the longest lines were reported by District voters at the Columbia Heights Educational Campus on 16th & Irving streets Northwest, where multiple people told Roll Call they waited two or more hours to cast a vote this morning.

Voters at precincts in Arlington and Alexandria, Va., waited in two-hour lines that stretched for blocks early Tuesday, though by lunch time, the wait times there had dwindled, according to first-hand reports. The earlier delays were attributed to a shortage of functioning electronic voting machines. At the Walter Reed Community Center in Arlington, for example, only four of the five voting machines were working. In D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, a polling place had only one electronic machine, according to Roll Call’s Janie Lorber.

In the battleground state of Ohio, a polling precinct near the University of Cincinnati had virtually no line by early afternoon. Caleb Faux, executive director of the Hamilton County Democratic Party and one of two Democrats on the county’s four-member elections board, said he was more concerned about “many, many reports” that voters are being “pushed into” using a provisional ballot when they met the criteria for casting a regular ballot. An influx of additional provisional ballots could be problematic in a close race because they cannot be counted in Ohio until Nov. 17.

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