Mercury is retrograde for the first time during an election since the one in 2000, and we all know how that turned out: a few hanging chads determined the course of history.

MSNBC reports:

Programming errors and inexperience dealing with electronic voting machines frustrated poll workers in hundreds of precincts early Tuesday, delaying voters in Indiana, Ohio, Miss. and Florida and leaving some with little choice but to use paper ballots instead.

In Cleveland, voters rolled their eyes as election workers fumbled with new touchscreen machines that they couldn’t get to start properly until about 10 minutes after polls opened.

The New York Times reports:

No one expects Florida elections to go smoothly, but this year the state got off to an alarming start. Voters reported that after selecting Democratic candidates on electronic voting machines, the review screens registered that they had chosen Republicans. A spokeswoman for the Broward County supervisor of elections told The Miami Herald that the machines often fall out of sync under heavy use, but that they can be fixed when voters complain.

With Mercury (along with the Sun and Venus) in a tight square to Neptune the Times goes on:

Unfortunately, many of the things that go wrong [today] may be invisible to the average voter. Machines that appear to work properly may be throwing out or altering votes. Without a voter-verified paper trail and an effective vote audit, this can go undetected. Provisional ballots may be wrongly rejected after the polls close. Some states, shamefully, have laws saying that if a provisional ballot is cast in the correct polling place but at the wrong table, it will not count.

Hopefully the result will be clear enough that it is beyond dispute. Otherwise we could be in a bit of a sticky wicket.