The election results in North Carolina will be delayed for about an hour after the North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE) voted to extend the voting hours at four polling stations due to technical issues.
According to The Hill, the NCSBE extended voting hours at the four sites for various amounts of time. Initially, polling sites were to remain open until 7:30 p.m. ET, but the extension could push the earliest elections results to 8:15 p.m. ET. Sampson County’s Plainview Fire Station received an extra 45 minutes, while another polling site received an extra 24 minutes.
The polling site at Bluford Elementary School in Greensboro will remain open an extra 34 minutes, while the polls at First Missionary Baptist Church in Concord will be extended for an extra 17 minutes.
There were reportedly issues with an on-site printer at several of the sites, but there was a human-related delay at the Guilford County site.
“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 said in a statement on Tuesday (Nov. 3). “The State Board routinely meets to discuss the extension of hours when the need arises.”
Other cities across the country experienced technical difficulties at the polls. In Spalding County, Georgia, voters were forced to use provisional ballots after all voting machines stopped working.
The issue was quickly resolved and the machines were working properly by mid-morning, but that didn’t prevent some voters from walking out of the line and leaving.
“There’s a lot of people [who] left within the past hour-and-a-half,” one voter told 11 Alive. “Hopefully they come back and everybody gets their vote in, but right now there is a lot of people who left within 30 minutes after they said the machines were down.”