Voting machines failed at the Rockwell polling place in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood on Election Day, leaving one of the three precincts that vote at the site unable to cast ballots at all, while at least two precincts ran out of paper ballots and voters were turned away.
Technicians for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners were called to the 1st Ward site at least twice and could not repair the electronic machines. With no working machines in one precinct and no paper ballots left in others, voters were told to come back later or sent to the Bucktown super-site to vote there instead, while the Board worked to deliver more ballots to Rockwell.
For a voter who made the trip, the failure means a second trip or a second location in the middle of a working day, and a real risk that some voters simply never get to cast a ballot. Chicago voters turned away from their own polling place can still vote the same day at any of the city's vote centers, and Illinois polls stay open until 7 p.m.
Rockwell was the second big voting failure of this Election Day: in Westchester County, New York, ballot scanners stopped accepting paper ballots across the county the same morning, sending votes into emergency bags to be counted later. Two breakdowns in two states, in the middle of the midterm vote, on a day when the Justice Department has about 1,000 election monitors in all 50 states.
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