Utah County

As you all have no doubt heard, the encoders for the Diebold machines in Utah County, Utah (which is the county south of Salt Lake City and home of BYU) had problems with their polls opening because the encoder cards had problems. I was down there at 8:45 and everything was under control. In each precinct, the poll workers had turned one machine into an encoder and they actually liked using the machine as an encoder better because it was easier than using the hand encoders. There were relatively short lines–10 or 12 people–and things were moving slowly. Given that Utah County has only three full time election staff for a county with over 115,000 registered voters, they did a very good job recovering from this problem.

There were problems associated with poll workers asking voters to come back later, as opposed to having the voters cast a provisional ballot. However, the machines are all back up and running now.