A sampling of e-voting glitches on election day 2006

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Humans are dumb: At least some glitches are easier to fix than others. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that precinct workers were puzzled about why their computers weren't working. "You need to plug them in," a technician patiently explained. "They were running them on battery power."

Humans are lazy: A polling location in Oklahoma opened late because an election inspector overslept, according to The Oklahoman.

The age factor: The average age of poll workers in Indianapolis is 72. That caused problems when hooking things up on Tuesday morning, the Washington Post said: "Some older poll workers Marion County Clerk Doris Anne Sadler said, were unable to hook up cables between optical scan voting machines and new touch-screen models for people with physical disabilities. She compared the task to connecting a printer and mouse to a laptop computer."

Server problems: Colorado: State officials told us that the problems with its e-voting machines were primarily human error. But the Denver Post reports that the story doesn't end there: "Denver Election Commission spokesman Alton Dillard II said the system's 'e poll book' laptop computers--which are used to verify each voter--were bogged down early in the day, forcing election judges to manually call other election officials by telephone to certify the voters. The system became so bogged down by 1 p.m. that election officials were forced to shut down the computers and reboot them, Dillard said."

Web site problems: In Michigan, the Web site for Republican Senate candidate Mike Bouchard was shut down after being hacked, Fox News reported. At least one election commission Web site also had problems.

Low-tech problems: It was the lack of special pens to mark paper ballots that frustrated election officials, according to a report in the Chicago Tribune.

Statistic of the day: "By late afternoon, the Election Protection Coalition phone bank in Washington, D.C., said it had received 13,500 calls to complain about voting problems, but that only about 20 percent represented serious problems," according to MSNBC.com.

Second-best quote of the day: Former Mayor Robert Lankford reported a minor problem, according to a report in Tennessee's Gallatin News Examiner. "Somebody called in and complained that I told them how to vote," Lankford said. "I am not dumb enough to tell people how to vote."

Quote of the day: "We got five machines--one of them's got to work," said Willette Scullank, a trouble-shooter from the Cuyahoga County elections board, courtesy of the Associated Press.