Richland County needs better preparation
On Tuesday at around 11:12 p.m., NBC first declared that President Barack Obama had won Ohio and, by extension, the presidency. At 11:13 p.m., I cast my ballot at my local precinct after waiting a total of six hours in lines throughout the day. This was a problem across Richland County, and there is no excuse for it. The citizens of the county had to show up to vote, and they did. The responsibility of the officials was to make things run smoothly and allow the citizens to vote with minimal issues, and they failed miserably.
State law requires one voting machine for every 250 voters. There were around 250,000 voters in the county, which necessitated 1,000 voting machines. The county had that many, but only 800 of those were used. This led to there being five machines, with only four working, at my precinct of roughly 2,000 registered voters, instead of the eight it needed. I don’t have a lot of voting experience, but what little I have tells me you can never have too many voting machines. They break down and have issues so often that there will always be a need for them. Presidential elections often have higher turnout than forecasted, so there is no reason there should have been fewer machines than the law required. If anything, there should have been more.
Multiple other precincts throughout the county reported fewer machines than previous years, which was a travesty and a miscarriage of justice. Turnout was less than in 2008 in Richland County, but the lines likely contributed to that to at least some degree, even though turnout was down nationally. I saw countless elderly voters and those who weren’t able to stand for extended periods of time. Others toted small children, and a man who voted after me had to be at work in six hours. Seeing these regular Americans take their civic duty seriously enough to wait that long is was refreshing, but they shouldn’t have had to. Being made to wait hours in line is a form of disenfranchisement, because a lot of people who want to vote just don’t have multiple hours to waste. I don’t think it was intentional or malicious, but it was a display of tremendous ineptitude and unpreparedness, which is typical in this state.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the Electoral College made it so my presidential vote in South Carolina was almost inconsequential. The fact that someone in line yelled that Obama had been declared winner while I was still writing in my vote for Soil and Water Conservation District chairman makes this even truer. But I still did my civic duty, and my county completely botched its part. Voting is extremely important and worth waiting for, but it has to be operate better than it did.