Minneapolis Voters Encounter Problems With New E-Poll Books
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- The city of Minneapolis rolled out new technology on Election Day, meant to make the process of voting easier and faster, but some voters encountered a few hiccups.
For the first time, the city is using e-poll books which allow election judges to verify voters using iPads instead of bulky paper books.
Several voters told WCCO-TV they tried to cast their ballots early Tuesday morning at the Walker Church polling location in Minneapolis, but the iPad used to check voters in was unable to connect to the internet.
One voter claims he waited for 20 minutes and had to come back to vote.
"Fortunately, we just live a block from the polling station so we could just come right back. It would be a bummer if someone showed up to vote and couldn't get through and had to go to work or something," said Ben Horowitz.
The problem was resolved in under an hour.
"We had a handful of precincts that had some connectivity issues in terms of getting into the cloud...we were lucky to have the vendor on site to help us today so they were able to help us quickly resolve that," said Minneapolis City Clerk Casey Carl.
Ahead of Election Day, Minneapolis saw a record number of early voters.
In all, more than 11,000 people cast early ballots in the city, which is on par with a state or federal election year.
The precinct with the highest early voter turnout was in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis.
