Election results from the state of North Carolina will be delayed as the sunsets on election day. Due to continued technical issues, the North Carolina State Board of Elections has agreed to extend voting hours at four poll sites. As a result, four polling sites across three counties will stay open until 7:30 p.m. and results will not be released until 8:15 p.m.
“With 2,660 polling sites, it’s not unusual for minor issues to occur at polling sites that result in a brief disruption of voting,” the NCSBE stated.
“The State Board routinely meets to discuss the extension of hours when the need arises.”
North Carolina is not the first state to run into technical issues on election day. Earlier today, officials in Franklin, Ohio switched to paper check-in services after technical issues prevented poll workers from uploading registration information into electronic check-in systems. Elsewhere, poll workers in Spalding County, Georgia experienced county wide technical issues.
“What we’re really stressing is that when you see technology challenges or failures, more often than not, it is very, very, very rarely a cyber-related incident, it is typically a technology challenge, a misconfiguration, a failure,” a senior official from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said.
“Based on everything we have seen, that is what is going on out there.”
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