The goal of safeguarding democracy may be lofty, but the work is hardly glamorous. It involves waking before dawn to scout out problems and threats at poll sites, taking hotline calls from panicked voters, running to the courthouse to file emergency litigation, and staying up late to ensure every legitimate ballot is counted. In an age of rampant misinformation and rancorous politics, this nonpartisan work has grown harrowing.
Election Day has turned to election season in recent years, thanks to early voting and an increasingly contentious certification process, but Nov. 5 marks the last opportunity for citizens to participate in the democratic process, and what transpires today will likely tee up litigation in the coming days and weeks.
And so Law360 is documenting attorneys' election protection work, from the early morning hours before the polls open in the East, until the vote count begins in the West. Here are the stories of the lawyers on the ground, safeguarding the election.
4:00 p.m. Florida | Voting Location Website Down
By Cara Bayles
A team of attorneys at Baker & McKenzie LLP's Chicago office answered Florida voters' hotline calls on Tuesday. (Courtesy of Baker & McKenzie)
About 80 Baker & McKenzie LLP attorneys, most of them in the firm's Chicago office, took hotline calls from across Florida Tuesday.
The biggest problem of the day was a malfunction with the state election division's poll location look-up website, which was down for approximately three hours.
Floridians unsure of where to cast their ballots called 866-OUR-VOTE, the national election protection hotline orchestrated by Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The Baker & McKenzie attorneys recommended voters call their county supervisor of elections, who could look up their polls the old-fashioned way.
"Most people have come to rely on the where-do-I-vote website," according to Baker & McKenzie LLP partner Duffy Lorenz.
The hotline attorneys informed a team of attorneys in Florida, who in turn got in touch with local officials.
"Within 30 minutes or so, we had a person from the on-the-ground team in touch with a supervisor of elections in Florida," Lorenz said.
Overall, though, the day was quiet. Early voting ensured there wasn't a deluge and that the team of lawyers were prepared, and enough time had passed since Hurricanes Helene and Milton that affected voters knew where to vote.
"There was nothing too scary," Lorenz said.
3:40 p.m. Bladen County, North Carolina | Tabulator Snafu
By Phillip Bantz
An integral piece of voting equipment at a polling place in Bladen County, North Carolina is having a tech issue that could cause problems, according to an attorney serving as a poll watcher.
Raleigh-based lawyer Michael Boykin told Law360 that the time stamp on a ballot tabulator at Jones Lake State Park is 20 minutes faster than the actual time. Boykin is a volunteer poll watcher with the North Carolina Black Alliance.
Boykin advised the election official in charge of the precinct to contact the Election Protection Hotline at 888-OUR-VOTE to report the issue and seek a possible fix.
The machines do not automatically shut down when the state's polls close at 7:30 p.m. and voters who are in line at that time can still cast their ballots.
But if the tabulator's time stamp is inaccurate, it could create discrepancies between the machine's recordings and the election officials' records.
It was not immediately clear how the issue would be handled.
3:30 p.m. Atlanta, Georgia | Calling Up Voters
By Kelcey Caulder
Rather than taking calls from confused voters, lawyers and law students at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's Atlanta office actively called voters on Election Day, seeking to provide them with information about casting their ballot and clear up misinformation.
Quiana-Joy Ochiagha, of the NAACP's Office of General Counsel, started her day at 6 a.m., preparing the office to host a team of Howard University School of Law students tasked with calling Georgians who had not yet cast ballots.
Some of those calls involved providing would-be voters with information about where to vote or helping people arrange discounted transportation through the NAACP's partnership with Lyft, which provides $20 off of two rides — one to the polls, and one back.
Other calls, Ochiagha said, were targeted at correcting misinformation originating from the brief cancelation of the city of Camilla's special election to fill two local city council seats.
The special election was canceled on the evening of Nov. 4 after the city's election superintendent and assistant election superintendent announced their resignations in a letter posted on the city's Facebook page. However, the special election later did go forward after a judge's order to do so.
Before that order was issued, a post was made stating that the ongoing special election was canceled and signs were posted outside city hall announcing that the special election would not go forward as planned.
"Some voters were under the assumption that because the special election was canceled, the general election was canceled," Ochiagha said. "That is not the case, so our law students are getting out the word that the general election is ongoing."
As the day wore on, Ochiagha said she and her team also got involved with efforts to secure extended polling hours at the Etris-Darnell Community Center and C.H. Gullatt Elementary polling locations in Union City, Georgia, after five noncredible bomb threats led to temporary evacuations.
Election officials in Fulton County have requested a court order to extend polling place hours at the two locations, Ochiagha said, and the NAACP is doing its part to help ensure anyone who may have been impacted by the closures gets a chance to vote.
As part of those efforts, she said her team is helping obtain a court order extending the hours and sending letters to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger requesting that the extension be granted.
"For about 30 to 45 minutes people were evacuated from polling places, and under statute people are ensured they will have a full 12 hours to exercise their right to vote," Ochiagha said. "So, because of that interruption, we are trying to get the hours extended for the affected polling places in Fulton County to stay open an additional hour."
3:00 p.m. Columbus, Ohio | Monitoring Democracy, One Race At A Time
By Steven Trader
Professor Steven Huefner and a group of students at The Ohio State University Moritz School of Law have a unique role to play this Election Day. They are interested in the results, sure, but are more significantly tuned into the "margin of litigation" in dozens of races across the country Tuesday.
For weeks now, Huefner, the deputy director of the election law program at OSU, and three dozen students have been looking into the tightest contests this election cycle, from district congressional races to the presidential showdown, before huddling together on campus to document all litigation that stems from those battles on Tuesday and beyond.
The Moritz College of Law itself does not get involved in any of the litigation or offer legal advice, but uses those instances as a means to learn from and improve the democratic process as a whole, Huefner told Law360.
"The purpose of the election law program has been to develop a deep understanding of the way in which American elections are conducted and to be able to analyze and promote improvements in those processes, Huefner said. "And so every four years we have an especially important opportunity to try to help keep track of how well the election processes are being implemented, and also to help the public understand what is and isn't working and what is really going on with respect to all the details of these processes."
The OSU volunteers, mostly law students and faculty, met at noon at the campus radio station and will spend the day tracking close races through various news and social media platforms. The students were divided into jurisdictions where they will track what they've identified as races that could fall within the margin of litigation.
Some, like a Pennsylvania county congressional race, already saw a court order extending voting hours because of an equipment malfunction earlier in the day. Others may result in no court fight at all, Huefner said.
The atmosphere, he told Law360, was relaxed, with everyone enjoying each other's company while they generally monitored the election process Tuesday. Once the polls close, they will home in on those results where courts could play a role.
"We're interested both as citizens just in the outcome of the elections, but as election law researchers, we're really looking for whether there are close races where some legal challenge might still defer our ability to know the winner for some additional period of time," Huefner said.
2:30 p.m. Detroit, Michigan | Minor Hiccups, Festive Atmosphere
By Steven Trader
Nick Martire (front right) and Amanda Daily (back left) along with fellow UM Law students used their day off of school to serve as election challengers at multiple polling and vote count facilities in the Detroit area Tuesday. (Courtesy of Nick Martire)
A group of University of Michigan Law School students took advantage of a day off of class for Election Day, driving to the Detroit area Tuesday morning to serve as nonpartisan election challengers who monitor the location for fraudulent behavior.
Amanda Daily, co-president of the Michigan Voting project, was stationed this morning at an elementary school serving as a polling location, while fellow co-president and classmate Nick Martire was similarly embedded at a church.
One of the biggest issues at Martire's location was an accessibility ramp door being locked, temporarily holding up the voting line, while Daily dealt with some electioneering outside the location and a vote count machine temporarily shorting out, resulting in a few ballots that had to be spoiled and recounted. Otherwise the atmosphere was festive, the two told Law360.
"People did this really fun thing where, whenever a first time voter voted, the election inspector who gave them their ballot would go 'first time voter' and the whole room would cheer," Martire told Law360. "That was fun, and great just to get a closeup like that of democracy in action."
Daily and Martire, both 2L students at UM Law, partnered with Promote the Vote and United Michigan to set up volunteer opportunities for law students on Election Day. Both received multiple hours of training to serve as nonpartisan challengers, which puts them in an observational position to make sure any issues with voter registration, or with the casting of ballots, is resolved on site or else elevated to the proper election authorities.
"We're there to make sure every voter is able to get their vote counted," Daily told Law360. "There's a lot of little intricacies, like, for example, you actually don't have to have your ID to vote in Michigan, as long as you sign an affidavit that is still a legitimate vote and should be counted as such. We're there making sure little things like that are being followed."
Following a morning session at voter locations, Daily and Martire were heading to a Detroit absentee ballot counting center Tuesday afternoon to serve as monitors there, making sure that any challenges to cast ballots were legitimate.
2:15 p.m. Wyoming, Michigan | A Missing Ballot
By Aebra Coe
Erik Daly arrived for his first shift of the day Tuesday as a nonpartisan election challenger at 11:15 a.m. The polling location was a rustic log building in Pinery Park, in the city of Wyoming, Michigan, just outside Grand Rapids, the state's second-largest city.
A member of Miller Johnson's corporate mergers and acquisitions practice, Daly was volunteering with non-profit organization Promote the Vote. He immediately got to work upon arrival, checking in with the precinct chair and settling in working through a checklist to ensure the location was in compliance for a wide range of issues. He ensured that the poll was accessible for people with disabilities, that it had sufficient supplies, that its tabulators were in working order, and that appropriate signage was present.
During his nearly two-hour shift at the location, Daly didn't encounter any issues, and a line never formed at the location.
This is his first year working as an election challenger, Daly said. He became involved after an associate at his firm suggested they work with Promote the Vote. The firm formed an election integrity working group over the summer, and Daly and several other lawyers and paralegals completed training through the non-profit organization.
Daly says he hopes that the type of work the organization is doing will help ease concerns about the election process, and the wider legal system.
"It's about fostering trust… and ensuring the public understands that the system has safeguards in place," he said.
Daly's next stop after Pinery Park was another location in Wyoming, Michigan, at Bethany United Reform Church. He arrived just before 1 p.m. and all was quiet until 2:15, when poll workers began pulling ballot stubs out of the trash near the tabulation machine.
Three workers knelt on the floor looking through dozens of stubs.
The workers told Daley that a ballot had been issued, but that it was never returned. They were trying to determine whether the ballot had been taken out of the building. Daly spoke with the workers, made note of the time and took notes about what had occurred. As the workers crowded together to discuss what to do next, Daly leaned in to listen.
The precinct chair and other poll workers called the clerk's office to inform them of the missing ballot and searched further within and outside the building. Daly reported the incident to his Promote the Vote shift leader and to the organization's election hotline. The clerk's office planned to call the voter to see if they could cure the ballot.
Just after 3 p.m. the polling location ran out of voting applications, which every voter must fill out before voting. Soon before that the workers noticed they were running low and had called the clerk's office for more. Voters began to line up, waiting for the applications to arrive. A few left.
Daly spoke to the precinct chair, letting him know that voters unable to wait could opt to use an absentee ballot at the clerk's office. Approximately 10 minutes after the applications ran out, a representative from the clerk's office arrived with more.
"A thousand or so votes have been cast and there's one we're trying to track down. Overall, it's been a great experience collaborating with the election inspectors here and to demonstrate to the voters that people involved with the election are acting with transparency and integrity. And that they can be confident their votes are being cast and counted."
2:00 p.m. Atlanta, Georgia | Bomb Threats Complicate Voting
By Cara Bayles
Several bomb threats called into Georgia poll locations were non-credible and of Russian origin, according to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and only caused the temporary closure of polls in Union City, outside of Atlanta.
But while the threats have been deemed unserious, their repercussions continue. When the polls closed down, some voters lost a window of time during which they could vote. While they're open again now, some voters can't leave work to cast a ballot, and some may still be afraid to return to their polling place.
Those problems are further exacerbated by Georgia's new voting laws, and that's causing concern for election protection attorneys like Harold Franklin, a partner at King & Spalding.
It used to be the case that voters who showed up to the wrong precinct could still vote by provisional ballot, and their vote would be counted in the races that spanned both voting locations — for example, in contests involving statewide or presidential candidates.
But that changed with the passage of Senate Bill 202, sprawling election legislation signed into law three years ago. Now, those ballots will be thrown out, unless those voters go to the wrong precinct after 5 p.m. and swear and affirm that they're unable to get to the correct polling place before it closes.
"Any issues causing voters to vote out of precinct are certainly very concerning for us, and it's a matter of educating voters so they understand those repercussions," Franklin said. "We certainly are more concerned when we see deliberate efforts to prevent voters from being able to vote, or disrupt the process."
There have also been problems that Franklin has seen come up again and again during more than two decades of volunteering in elections — polls opening late, machines malfunctioning and problems with absentee ballots. Many of those require calls to election officials.
"We have these relationships with election officials at the county level and also at the Secretary of State's level," he said. "We have been engaged in those calls throughout the day and will be doing it for quite some time to come."
12:00 p.m. Nationwide | Attorneys Ready To Rep Election Workers
By Cara Bayles
An army of attorneys is at the ready to represent election workers who face threats and intimidation or seek to blow the whistle on misconduct by officials.
But as of midday on Tuesday, they remained on standby.
The Election Official Legal Defense Network, which was founded three years ago to offer free legal advice and representation to election officials who experience harassment and threats, has garnered more attorney volunteers around the country than ever before.
But as of noon on Election Day, David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which manages EOLDN, said he wasn't aware of any election officials calling in to seek legal representation from the group.
"We would prefer not to receive any requests, and we would prefer that election officials are not being abused and threatened and harassed. I suspect that a big issue right now is … election officials, they are very busy right now. And they, as they always do, they're keeping their heads down and getting their work done and facilitating voting. I'm cautiously optimistic that the threat environment will not affect them too much. But I will also say I wouldn't be surprised if we see the threat environment become difficult in the aftermath of the election."
The same was true of the Government Accountability Project, which has pro bono attorneys in almost every jurisdiction in battleground states ready to represent any election workers who want to blow the whistle on misconduct at the polls.
Dana Gold, director of the group's Democracy Protection Initiative, said they hadn't yet received any rapid response calls from election workers on Tuesday, but expected the real issues will come up not on Election Day, but during the certification process.
"We are ready, although I hope we have built a fire extinguisher that we do not need to use," she said. "This could be a long game, or, depending on the results, it could be over."
Representing a government whistleblower requires rigorous verification by attorneys who then guide clients through a difficult litigation process that involves fear of both futility and retaliation, Gold said. And for election workers, the stakes are even higher.
"It's a hard thing to blow the whistle, it's a hard thing to report in this environment. So it's not necessarily that we would expect a deluge of 100 calls," she said. "The other way to think about it also is, we know that, basically, elections run well. There are a lot of checks and balances. These are public servants dedicated to ensuring that the votes are counted fairly. We're just standing guard in case that that isn't what the priority is for some bad actors."
She said, ideally, she will get no calls.
"I want to have no reason to have this democracy protection initiative activated," she said.
11:00 a.m. Bladen County, North Carolina | 'Grooving And Dancing'
By Phillip Bantz
Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger" was pumping from a DJ's turntable to a mostly empty parking lot outside the North Carolina Cooperative Extension-Bladen County Center, one of several polling places in rural Elizabethtown that weren't seeing much voter action late Tuesday morning.
"We had some of the people that are working the polls over here dancing," said Melvin Marshall, also known as DJ Smylz, a volunteer with "DJs at the Polls," a national, non-partisan group that encourages people to vote. "We're bringing the good vibes. Grooving and dancing."
Inside the Bladen County Center, which was largely empty around 11 a.m., election official Pia Jessup told Law360 that things had been "pretty uneventful" so far. She attributed the low turnout Tuesday morning to "jam-packed" early voting.
It was a similar story just down the road at The National Guard Armory, another polling place in Elizabethtown, which has a population of about 3,300.
Michael Boykin, Raleigh-based lawyer volunteering as a poll watcher with the North Carolina Black Alliance, was surprised by the relative quiet.
"I would've expected to see more traffic, more voters during the daytime," he said.
Boykin started his day at 8 a.m., and planned to drive to different polling locations until they closed at 7:30 p.m. His organization has been sending attorneys to counties around the state since early voting began, focusing on rural counties and places that could be targeted for voter intimidation.
He said the lack of long lines on Election Day was probably a good sign.
"But as we are hearing from the different locations, there was a lot of activity during early voting, as well as the mail-in ballots," he added, "This is a little surprising, but that just means things have been going well."
10:30 a.m. Albuquerque, New Mexico | Quiet Out West
By Cara Bayles
Former public defender Kari Converse checked in on this poll site in southeast Albuquerque on Tuesday morning. (Courtesy of Kari Converse)
Kari Converse began poll monitoring in southeast Albuquerque, New Mexico at 7:30 a.m. local time, and about 90 minutes into her shift, she'd already visited five of the eight polling stations she'd been assigned.
She was looking for all the irregularities poll monitors watch for around the country — parking and disability access issues, a lack of clear signage, electioneering within 100 feet of a poll and voter intimidation. But so far, she'd said, everything was quiet and as it should be in her "corner of the world."
She's answered a few voter questions, and said she saw a police officer entering a poll, who told her he was there to give his number to the election judge in case a problem came up.
"Not the intimidation one would fear," she said.
A retired public defender, Converse said her career as an attorney informed her election protection work for Common Cause.
"I think I've got fairness and justice hardwired into my system, and I want to make sure that everyone who wants to vote has the opportunity to vote," she said. "How I voted doesn't matter to this work. I know there are people here voting not the way I would vote, but when I was a criminal defense attorney, just because I'd defend them as best I could didn't mean I agreed with their actions, just like here, I will defend people's right to vote, regardless of which way they want to vote."
9:30 a.m. Chapel Hill, North Carolina | Poll Workers Grapple With New Voter ID Law
By Steven Trader
A new voter identification law in North Carolina, a pivotal swing state in the 2024 presidential election, has already resulted in some confusion among poll workers on Election Day who are grappling with how to implement it.
Ann Webb, the policy director at Common Cause North Carolina, said the new voter ID law can be tricky to implement because of certain "sticky" situations, such as an elderly voter who is still allowed to use an expired ID card as long as it was valid on their 65th birthday. As part of the new law, voters can also opt to cast a provisional ballot and provide their identification later, or fill out a voter identification exception form.
"For the vast majority of the calls that we get, our assumption is that poll workers are simply grappling with a lot of new rules they need to understand," Webb told Law360. "We're able to connect directly with the county boards of elections, sometimes directly with the poll worker in that site, and make sure that a legal expert can help clarify. So we are optimistic that poll workers are trying their very hardest to do the right thing here."
Webb is part of dozens of legal volunteers who are taking calls directly from voters in a hotline command center at the headquarters of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Chapel Hill, NC on Election Day.
Any issues beyond basic advice to voters, such as how to find their polling location, gets passed to an "escalation team" that includes a group of attorneys like Ann and others. They follow up with voters directly and, if necessary, are on call to file emergency litigation. The coalition of attorneys are also in contact with the State Board of Elections about any confusion regarding the new voter ID law.
While polling places all appeared to be open on time in North Carolina, one issue that volunteers were paying close attention to was voter intimidation and electioneering, as instances of aggressive and intimidating signage targeting Spanish speaking voters had already plagued early voting locations.
Webb told Law360 that the U.S. Department of Justice would be on location in three North Carolina counties — Mecklenberg, Alamance and Wake — monitoring polling sites to ensure voters are not faced with any intimidating tactics.
Attorneys with the Black Legal Network, a program of the North Carolina Black Alliance, have likewise been fanning out across the state to monitor polls for access issues and voter intimidation.
They've already encountered complaints of intimidation and partisan poll workers during the early voting season, but Yolanda Taylor, the group's program attorney, said Election Day is an important final push. In big counties, like Mecklenburg, Wake and Durham, a large percentage of Black voters and voters of color had not yet voted as of Monday evening, she said.
"Hopefully they will get out to the polls today," she said. "I know some people just have this tradition of voting on Election Day, or feeling like their vote only counts on election Day for whatever reason."
Webb added that so far, more than 4.5 million people have participated in early voting, surpassing the amount in the 2020 election.
"We know that the population of North Carolina has grown, but we are seeing rates of turnout incredibly high, which just emphasizes that voters are voting in spite of new barriers to voting, and we are turning out in force, not to be deterred," Webb said.
7:30 a.m. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | Broken Ballot Scanners
By Matthew Santoni
At about 7:30 a.m., the calls started coming into the election protection "command center" at Reed Smith's Pittsburgh office: Multiple ballot scanners, which read marked paper ballots for later tabulation, were not reading ballots in Cambria County, Pa.
In dozens of calls to hotlines staffed by lawyers from firms including Blank Rome, Troutman Pepper and Kirkland & Ellis, voters reported they were instructed to insert their completed ballots into secure boxes to be scanned later, but some said they were turned away or given provisional ballots that wouldn't be counted until after Election Day.
Run by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania and staffed by attorney volunteers, the Pennsylvania Election Protection Coalition command center handling election-protection complaints for all of Western Pennsylvania started taking information and its leaders began weighing their options.
There were attempts to contact the local election office and the Pennsylvania Department of State, and discussion of sending field volunteers — connected with the election-protection operation through Common Cause Pennsylvania — to verify the problems and talk to election officials about what was being done to fix the scanners and keep people voting.
But the Cambria County solicitor, Ronald Repak of Dillon McCandless King Coulter & Graham, beat the voter-protection lawyers to the punch and filed a request with the county court to keep the polls open later. The court issued the order shortly after 11:30 a.m., keeping the polls open until 10 p.m. and directing anyone who votes after 8 p.m. to use a provisional ballot, so the command center attorneys put out a notice to the hotline volunteers to remind callers of the new deadlines and rules.
Sara Rose, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the leader of the Pittsburgh command center, said the Cambria County scanner issue was the biggest issue of Election Day as of mid-morning, though a few other reports had cropped up elsewhere in the 30-plus counties the Western Pennsylvania center was covering.
Voters with concerns can call the hotlines, staffed by law firm volunteers who make the first attempt at resolutions by asking questions and giving out information, Rose said. Problems that aren't solved at that stage get a "ticket" in the command center's computer system, and can be assigned via the messaging app Slack to lawyers at the command center or in the field for additional consultation or follow-ups at the polling places.
If an issue needs it, the organization has attorneys available to go to the county-level election courts, where judges stand by all day to hear motions generated from templates or in improvised oral arguments, Rose said.
Other law firms and businesses have contributed attorney personnel to the effort, including Dechert, Arnold and Porter, Ballard Spahr (which was hosting a similar command center in its Philadelphia offices), BNY Mellon and Highmark, she said.
One polling place in Blair County was asking every voter for identification, even though state law says only first-time voters at a polling place have to do so, Rose said, so an attorney from the Pittsburgh team made a call to the county solicitor to pass along a reminder of the rules. Students at the University of Pittsburgh were being told they were at the wrong polling place, so volunteers at the command center were trying to run down if there were other polls on campus and if the students, county or poll workers were mistaken about who should go where, and correct that information if necessary.
Other issues included polling places that didn't open promptly at 7 a.m., or complaints about signs and electioneering encroaching on the 10-foot limit around polling places where they are prohibited.
6:00 a.m. Newark, New Jersey | Lack Of Signs Confuse Voters
By Corey Rothauser
Stanley Holdorf started his Election Day before the sun came up at 5 a.m. in Newark, New Jersey.
Holdorf, an attorney with the Lawyers for Equal Access to Advocacy & Dignity Foundation, arrived at the Boylan Street Recreation Center before it was set to open at 6 a.m. He spoke with a small group of voters who'd already gathered there, eager to vote before their early work shift.
But while he was there, he got a phone call from Amelia Armstrong, executive director of the LEAAD Foundation. Reports of late openings and lack of directional signage had come in from voter tips and social media posts. Holdorf hopped in his car, which bore a white decal that identified him as an election monitor.
The LEAAD Foundation is coordinating the Election Protection New Jersey Coalition's field program, which sends nonpartisan poll monitors to voting locations across the state.
This year, approximately 70 poll monitors, 75% of whom are attorneys, committed over 500 pro bono hours to monitor polling stations across New Jersey. The program's participants include corporate pro bono initiatives, law schools and bar associations.
"Our mission is twofold," Armstrong told Law360. "We aim to answer voter questions at polling places and identify any irregularities, so that our coalition partners can work to resolve them swiftly."
At Weequahic High School, a few voters gathered in confusion about where they were supposed to go. The door was closed. There was no signage. It turned out the official address of the polling place did not reflect that the entrance was on the other side of a large building on the school's campus, about a half-mile away.
Holdorf drove two voters to the other side of the building. One woman said she had to go, and left without casting a ballot.
"It is a great concern to me that some of these voters may have been trying to vote for the first time and had this very negative experience," Holdorf told Law360. "Others, I think, frankly, would have felt like they were ignored by the very government, the very county government, that they were counting on to be able to vote."
He reported the problem back to election protection headquarters, where attorneys called local officials. After about 90 minutes, signs had been put in the front of the building indicating the entrance was on the other side.
Holdorf was glad the issue was fixed, but expressed frustration that it had occurred at all.
"It's a disappointment that any voter has been turned away or turned off when the one thing they can do in a good, functioning democracy is cast the ballot and make a difference," Holdorf said. "Those who tried and couldn't have been hurt in ways, and so has our democracy."
For a reprint of this article, please contact reprints@law360.com.