New Jersey's Electronic Voting a Total 'Disaster'

ABC News doesn't pull any punches when it comes to describing New Jersey's electronic voting experiment: It "failed." Voters in the state who were displaced by superstorm Sandy were allowed to vote via email or fax—or try to. Election office staffers took as long as 15 minutes to process each request they received for an electronic ballot, and in one county, the county clerk simply stopped fulfilling the e-ballot requests after receiving more than 2,000 by yesterday morning.

In another county (whose clerk dubs the whole thing "an unprecedented disaster"), would-be voters were foiled by busy signals and emails bouncing back from overstuffed inboxes. Even voters who were able to submit their ballots weren't sure what became of them. "They didn't send any kind of confirmation email that even the ballot was received which makes me feel like my vote might not have counted," says one. In response to the problems, the electronic voting deadline has been extended to Friday, but at least one voting rights group is concerned that many may simply gave up and decide not to vote since the election has already been called. (More Election 2012 stories.)