Polling Places

Voters in 97 different divisions will be sent to new polling places for next Tuesday's general election. Gary Ferris, who arranges polling locations for the city commissioners' office, said about two-thirds of the new polling places were spurred by issues involving access for the disabled. In other cases, polling places had to be moved because the owners no longer wanted to rent them to the city, or because buildings were closed or undergoing repairs. A list of the polling places that are changing is available on the city commissioners' website: http://phillyelection.com/2011Changes.pdf . - Bob Warner

Five polling places are being relocated for the Nov. 8 municipal elections, based on a vote Tuesday by the Bucks County Board of Elections. Voting in Bristol Township's District 6-1 will move permanently from the First Presbyterian Church to the Greater Word to the World Ministries at 4117 Woerner Ave. The four temporary relocations are: Falls Township District 4-1, from St. Paul's Episcopal Church to Pinewood Pool at 1 Pinewood Dr.; New...

City election officials have joined the Democratic Party in seeking to delay a plan that would change polling places for thousands of voters in the November mayoral election. The plan, ordered by Common Pleas Judge Armand Della Porta, redraws the boundaries of 1,075 of the city's 1,795 election divisions, eliminating 115 divisions in the process. It also calls for retaining most polling places in the affected divisions, which have about 650,000 voters. Neither the judge nor election officials could say how many voters would be required to use a new polling place.

A last-minute Republican effort to relocate 63 Philadelphia polling places has sparked outrage from Democrat John Kerry's presidential campaign, which says the choice of locations in heavily African American neighborhoods shows that the GOP wants to suppress black voter turnout. But the Republicans said the real outrage is the state of the polling places they want to change - many of them in bars, homes or vacant buildings. The challenges, filed late Friday, appear to have little chance of succeeding.

After voting with outdated equipment in San Francisco and Honolulu, I was amazed by Philadelphia's polling places. Finding a candidate was impossible; they were not in any order. Alphabetical would have helped. When I asked how to locate Mr. Councilman or Ms. Judge, etc., people in the polls would shout out "It's next to Nesmith" or "to the right of Kenney. " Why are the numbers never mentioned? Names mentioned out loud tend to influence a voter - not to mention the 10 people outside the polling place pushing candidates, which adds to the indecision.

Dressed in a rose-colored wool coat and a leopard-spotted beret, Mabel Detweiler was ready for her task on an Election Day that was cold, dreary and sometimes wet. "It's real easy today," Detweiler said, as she slipped a green leaflet into the hand of a gray-haired woman voting at a polling station at Hopkins Ford in Abington. "If you're voting for all our Republicans, you just pull one lever. " Detweiler, 72, has worked in presidential elections since 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to his second term.

With its decades-old voting technology, Philadelphia takes as long as a month to finish the official count after an election. That's when the hulking, 25- and 50-year-old voting machines are working at all. Election Day malfunctions are routine. The system works only because city election workers spend the months leading up to an election in a labor-intensive and sometimes desperate scramble to ready the city's machines. Those chores involve scrounging spare parts for machines built by companies no longer in business, testing the machines, and then lugging these 1,000-pound behemoths to hundreds of polling places.

Voters in Philadelphia and throughout the state trickled to the polls this morning to face a crowded ballot that contains only a modicum of romance. Early reports were that turnout was low, although those who stay home - expected to be about 75 percent of the city's 820,000 registered voters - won't have the weather as an excuse. An Accu-Weather meteorologist said this morning that there were clear or partly sunny skies in every part of the state, with temperatures here and elsewhere in the low 60s. Conditions were expected to remain that way for most of the day, except for brief, widely scattered showers.

About 64,000 Philadelphians will be voting in new divisions in next Tuesday's mayoral election. But city officials say it's no problem - those voters already know who they are. A massive realignment of election divisions, designed to make the polling places roughly equal in size, will go into effect Nov. 3 for wards 1 through 33. In those wards, according to election officials, 61 divisions have been eliminated and 433 divisions have new...

Officials of Philadelphia and a national disabilities group have agreed to settle a civil-rights lawsuit with a three-year plan to make the city's voting machines and polling places more accessible to voters who are blind or use wheelchairs. The proposed settlement of the two-year-old suit by the National Organization on Disability and nine local disabled citizens was filed last week in federal court in Philadelphia. The agreement was preliminarily approved by U.S. District Judge John R. Padova, who ordered the proposal published in three newspapers this month and set a hearing for Nov. 19. "I cried - that was my reaction," said Jessie Jane Lewis, 55, a Manayunk performance artist who was one of the suit's nine local plaintiffs.

Like his father before him, former City Councilman Frank Rizzo Jr. is taking to the airwaves in his political retirement, as a radio talk-show host. Rizzo says he'll be doing occasional gigs on WPHT 1210, and he promises to be "less politically correct" than when he took calls at WWDB in the 1990s, while a councilman. "My slogan will be 'Rizzo Unleashed,' " Rizzo told us last week. "I'll always be polite, but I'll tell it like it is, and I have the ability to do that. I'm going to tell people possibly about some of the work ethic in City Council, in some of the people who represent them in the suburbs, and not in a watered-down way. " Asked about times when he pulled his punches, Rizzo said: "Talking about some of my colleagues, I had to be a little bit sensitive.

P OLL WORKERS in Chester worry that the state's new voter-ID bill could suppress turnout. You know what else suppresses turnout? Gunshots. More than a dozen shots rang out Tuesday morning near a polling place on Johnson Street in Sun Village, a watch-your-back neighborhood in Chester's East Side. "We have a lot of people who walk here to vote. We want to protect them, but how can we?" asked Ashaki-Imani Prince, a judge of elections. "They'll be afraid they might be shot. " The voting booths are inside a garage that already has a couple of bullet holes in it - including one that went through the front door into the back wall - from a previous shooting.

Barely a trickle of voters dripped into polls today in Pennsylvania, despite the chance to finally weigh-in on the presidential primary, with Republicans facing a choice of Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul or Mitt Romney. But the real contest is possibly the outcome when potential voters are asked to produce a picture ID for the first time before pulling the lever. The ID could be an issue for thousands of residents without drivers licenses, particularly in the city where public transportation is a norm.

JUST IN case you've forgotten, today is primary Election Day. But even if you've been snoozing, we have you covered. Here's everything you need to know: There are competitive primary races for the state House of Representatives in many parts of the city, a Democratic battle for the state Attorney General nomination and a Republican face off to oppose Democratic Sen. Bob Casey in November. There's also a competitive GOP primary for auditor general. And, of course, the Republican presidential primary, which went from exciting to dull when Rick Santorum, closest rival to front-runner Mitt Romney, dropped out. For more details on all the candidates, check out our roundups at www.phillyclout.com . The state's new law requiring photo identification for all voters at the polls doesn't go into effect until the Nov. 6 general election.

Defiantly, begrudgingly or compliantly, Pennsylvania voters took the test run of the state's new voter ID requirement in stride Tuesday, generally producing photo identification as requested but occasionally registering protests. Whether they offered identification or not, registered voters who showed up at their old polling places were ushered to voting machines and permitted to start punching buttons - an option they'll be denied in November's general election unless they can show election officials a Pennsylvania driver's license or other specified ID. Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele, part of the state Republican machinery which pushed voter ID into law in mid-March, made a surprise visit Tuesday morning to five polling places in Northeast Philadelphia and said the state's "soft rollout" appeared to be successful.

Last week, the Philadelphia Bar Association sent a legislative action alert e-mail urging members to immediately call their legislators to oppose the voter ID bill that was being considered in the state Senate. The e-mail included a convenient "quickly generate a letter now" button. With the click of a mouse, a form letter full of Democratic talking points against voter ID and sprinkled with references to Philadelphia as the birthplace of democracy was spewed out. As a member of the association, I was among the recipients of this e-mail with the alarmist title "Your Action Needed Now to Preserve the Right to Vote.

The newly elected commissioners of Philadelphia's election machinery said Wednesday that they would end a practice allowing several hundred election-day workers to collect double pay by filling two different jobs at city polling places. "We will not be double-paying in the next election or any future elections," City Commissioners Chairwoman Stephanie Singer announced at a public meeting. The issue was raised by Joseph DeFelice, a state Republican Party organizer, who obtained payroll data from last November's general election and reported that 420 people appeared to have been paid twice - three of them three times - for work at the polls.

  CONCORD, N.H. - For months Mitt Romney's name has seemed to carry the modifier fragile before the noun front-runner . But for all the hemming and hawing voters expressed as they solidified their choices during the last few days, a close look at results of an exit poll shows a sweeping victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary Tuesday for Romney. There was no gender gap. Romney swept every age category except among voters aged 18 to 29, who went for libertarian Ron Paul.

In January, there will be two new faces among the three city commissioners, who run Philadelphia elections: Stephanie Singer, a mathematician and Center City ward leader who beat longtime incumbent Marge Tartaglione in the Democratic primary; and Al Schmidt, leader of an insurgent faction in the city Republican Party, who beat GOP incumbent Joseph Duda. They talked this week with staff writer Bob Warner about their hopes and plans for the office. Excerpts follow.   Question: What do you agree on most strongly as priorities for change?