Report: Virginia not prepared for high voter turnout

WASHINGTON - A new study released last week indicates that several battleground states, including Virginia, are not adequately prepared to handle the high turnout expected on Election Day.

The Advancement Project, which advocates the need for voters to vote efficiently, specifies Fairfax County and Alexandria as being among the worst resourced and ill-prepared jurisdictions in the seven battleground states examined.

"We are concerned that they do not have enough polling place resources," says Jim Freeman of the Advancement Project. "There may not be enough machines, enough privacy booths, enough poll workers."

The report says that the Virginia jurisdictions may face extremely long lines, and may not be able to accommodate all voters in the allotted 13 hours. The report also says the jurisdictions lack an adequate number of poll workers to compensate for the potential increase in turnout.

The lack in resources is expected to have a disproportionate affect on high-minority precincts, where the numbers were lower than low-minority precincts. The report states that a mis-allocation of resources could violate the Voting Rights Act.

"There is more engagement in communities of color this year than perhaps any time in our nation's history," Freeman says.

The Fairfax County Office of Elections says there is no indication that there will be any problem on Election Day.

"I take a great bit of exception to some of the allegations in the report that we are not prepared for the election," says Rokey Suleman, the General Registrar of the Fairfax County Office of Elections.

"We are going to have lines this November," Suleman says. "I don't want to diminish that fact, but we are not going to have anything to the magnitude that the Advancement Project is alleging."

Suleman assures that anybody that is in line when the polls close will be able to vote.

Other places around the region have taken steps to ensure there are no problem with a high voter turnout.

Marjorie Roher of the Montgomery County Board of Elections says the county has received additional voting machines from the Maryland Board of Elections, as well as increasing the number of election judges that will be sent to polling places.

"We are also instituting a student aid program and a greeter program in those precincts where we are anticipating a very high turnout first thing in the morning," Roher says.

After a problem during the D.C. primaries with incorrect numbers, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics says measures have been taken to make sure accurate results are tabulated.

"The major thing that we are doing is we are going to be uploading all of the results twice," says Dan Murphy of the D.C. Board of Elections. "we are going to have a primary server and a backup server, so that when we report numbers, we can compare to make sure what we have is in fact correct."

Murphy says there will be plenty of voting machines for polling places, and recruitment for poll workers has gone "pretty well."

"We always need poll workers," Murphy says. "We can never have enough."

(Copyright 2008 by WTOP. All rights reserved.)