Or dust collecting on the reader, which gets worse over time as you count ballots. Therefore, the state requires that third counts be done by hand. The final tally gave Wilkie the seat by 11 votes, even though she'd initially lost by 8. Bartlett is quick to point out how North Carolina's hand counts are different from the one that took place in Palm Beach County. Most of the complaints come from voters who ignore mail we send telling them about precinct changes.
Voters have to take responsibility, too.
We had the fewest complaints about that this year, down from 1996. In addition, Poucher points out, N.C. law provides for provisional ballots, which must be offered to every voter who encounters an administrative problem at the polls, and which are verified after the election. Instead, poll workers were instructed to phone the central office to confirm problem registrations, a plan that quickly broke down as phone lines got clogged. No one knows the exact number of legitimate voters who were denied a chance to vote, or the number of illegitimate voters who snuck in unchallenged, because of the breakdown of the system for checking registrations in Florida. But it appears that many poll workers either didn't know or didn't care to offer affidavit ballots - especially to new and minority voters.