Registered Philadelphia voters forced to cast provisional ballots: report

Many voters in Philadelphia are being asked to cast provisional ballots despite having registration cards, according to City Paper.

Poll workers and voters have reported that many residents of the city who had registered to vote were not appearing on the voter rolls. Those voters have been asked to cast provisional ballots, which can take up to a week to be counted.

"Their names are not in the books," clerk Gwen Howard told City Paper. "Something different. Some have [registration] cards and are not in the books. And you know they come every four years...They were pretty upset."

The Committee of Seventy, which monitors elections in Philadelphia, said the problem seemed to be a clerical issue.

"For any voters whose registrations were processed after October 23rd, their registrations were supposed to go into a Supplemental Poll Book, and an issue seems to be whether all these new, late-processed registrations made it to the polling place on time for Election Day," the group said in a statement.

The Committee of Seventy said it had also received reports that some polling places were not allowing voters to cast provisional ballots and had alerted City Commissioners about the issue.

The group warned city officials in mid-October that a huge backlog of voter registration applications could remain unprocessed by Election Day.

[Vote here via Shutterstock]