DeKalb precinct to stay open an extra hour
Elsewhere, voting reported going fairly smoothly

By CARLOS CAMPOS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A DeKalb County precinct will be held open an extra hour tonight due to problems earlier today with electronic voting machines.

Poll workers had problems encoding voter access cards this morning at Allgood Elementary School in Stone Mountain. The problem was corrected within an hour. But elections officials asked a judge to keep the precinct open until 8 p.m. to make up for the lost time. Similar problems in south Georgia's Irwin County also led to a one-hour extension on voting.

Despite those problems — and other minor glitches reported throughout metro Atlanta and the state — voting was relatively smooth today, said Secretary of State Cathy Cox, the state's chief elections official.

"Almost without exception, the only problems we heard today were human error," Cox said this afternoon.

Cox pushed the state's purchase of 23,000-plus electronic voting machines, which were used for the first time statewide in fall of 2002.

She said today that there is still a slight learning curve for the machines, but that problems related to them decrease with each election.

"Every election, you have new poll workers and new voters," Cox said. "There's tens of thousands of people moving into Georgia every month. It's gonna take a while until it's old hat to people."

Cox described turnout as "light to medium," which is what she had expected. Cox predicted that roughly 30 percent of Georgia's 3.8 million voters would cast a ballot today.