Alt-right trolls turned away from vote, had neglected to register

As millions Americans filled polling stations across the United States, a number of alt-right Trump supporters — known for their fervent defense of the Republican candidate on social media — appear have had trouble voting due to failure to register before the election.

According to online chat forums frequented by alt-right activists, a number of the self-proclaimed online “trolls” were turned away from polling stations where they were not registered to vote.

In the run-up to the vote, Trump has made unsupported claims of a rigged election and raised fears that hackers might attack voting systems. He reiterated his claims on Election Day, after his campaign announced it was seeking an investigation in the battleground state of Nevada over reports that some early voting locations had allowed people to join lines to vote after polls were scheduled to close.

Concerns of voter intimidation and fraud led to a flurry of lawsuits in the run-up to Election Day, and new voter regulations in more than a dozen states also held the potential to sow confusion at polling places.

Those allegations appear to have spurred conspiracy theories among some who claimed Tuesday they were being targeted — despite most of their posts detailing problems with voter registration, being ejected for bringing unauthorized campaign paraphernalia into the polling stations and in some cases, simply voting for the wrong person on the ballot.

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Asked on Fox News if he would accept Tuesday’s results, Trump continued to demur.

“We’re going to see how things play out today and hopefully they will play out well and hopefully we won’t have to worry about it,” Trump said. Later in the interview, he said, “it’s largely a rigged system.”

But at least in the early going, most of the problems were routine — the kinds of snags that come every four years, like the lines, machines not working properly, and issues with ballots or voter rolls. One New Jersey voter reported waiting three hours because there were too few voting machines at her polling place in Jersey City.

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In Texas, a computer used by election clerks malfunctioned at a polling place inside a high school in suburban Houston, forcing officials to briefly divert voters to another polling place more than two miles away. Fort Bend County Elections Administrator John Oldham said the malfunctioning console was later replaced with a backup and voting resumed.

Election officials in Utah said voting machine problems in the southern part of the state forced poll workers early in the day to use paper ballots. A computer problem in Durham County, North Carolina — a Democratic stronghold in a state that has been a key battleground in the presidential race — triggered long lines when election officials had to rely on a paper check-in process.

There were also sporadic reports of people in North Carolina who said they were not put on the voter rolls despite registering to vote through the Division of Motor Vehicles.

The question this year was whether problems would be widespread and indicate a pattern of fraud or voter intimidation.

Trump had suggested that Philadelphia was among those places ripe for voter fraud. The city’s district attorney, Seth Williams, said in mid-afternoon that his office had investigated 68 complaints about voter intimidation, broken machines or other problems, a number consistent with the past three presidential elections. He said all had proven unfounded.

In the last week alone, Democrats went to court in seven states seeking to halt what they claim were efforts by Republicans and the Trump campaign to deploy a network of poll watchers hunting for voter fraud. Republicans have disputed claims they are planning to intimidate voters, and judges largely found no evidence of efforts to suppress voters.

While there were concerns that the heated rhetoric of the campaign would lead to confrontations at the polls, only a few minor skirmishes were reported. In southeastern Michigan, authorities said an argument outside a polling place between a woman supporting presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and another backing Trump led a man to shove one of the women and spurred others to join in. No arrests were made.