Eyebrows McGee ran into some trouble at the polling place today. She was only allowed to vote in federal races, not local ones. The poll workers didn’t know how to fix it, so essentially, through no fault of her own, Eyebrows was denied her right to vote in local elections.

I’ve e-mailed Tom Bride at the Election Commission asking him about this situation, but as you might expect, he’s a little busy today, so I don’t expect to hear from him any time soon.

On the positive side, this wasn’t an equipment failure, but rather human error. But on the negative side, the problem is reportedly widespread, which means this problem could cause some headaches if the vote is at all close in any of the races today.

UPDATE: I heard from Tom Bride. He said the problem is not system-wide; there are actually only a handful of cases. In each case, it was human error. The judge is supposed to compare the application to the code receipt to make sure they match.

The important thing to remember is this — if you get the wrong ballot, this situation can be corrected provided you haven’t hit “cast ballot” the final time. Once you hit “cast ballot” and get the American flag waving on the screen, it’s like dropping a ballot in the ballot box and you can’t get it back. Any time before that, however, they can void out your ballot and let you start over, including providing you with the proper ballot.