Election results website experiences outages, slowness
RALEIGH (WTVD) -- Just as we saw in the primary election, we saw an issue once again with the State Board of Election's results reporting website.
Officials released a statement explaining that the website encountered intermittent outages and updating lags. It is working with the State Office of Information Technology to increase bandwidth and resolve display errors.
As a backup, the State Board is also posting PDF results here.
"We regret the inconvenience these intermittent outages have caused," said Executive Director Kim Westbrook Strach of the State Board of Elections. "We are working to resolve these issues."
The SBOE also had to have an emergency meeting Tuesday night just before the polls closed at 7:30 p.m. In Johnston County, the Kay Hagan campaign there complained about an error by the Johnston County Board of Elections. Pictures of two polling sites were swapped which caused people to go to the wrong precinct.
In 2-3 vote though, board members did not feel this warranted an extension of voting times in those particular precincts since there wasn't enough confusion to cause someone to complete a vote at the wrong place.
Another issue out of Johnston County was a precinct that did not open for an hour-and-half Tuesday morning. Voters affected were told to come back.
An issue out of Robeson County did extend voting time at one precinct there by 40 minutes, because they ran out of ballots.
"Robeson county had an issue where they ran out of ballots in one precinct, the statute requires that 110 percent of any given precincts ballot be at the location throughout the day. They fell well short of that, there were about 2,200 registered voters in that precinct, they had about 500 ballots," said Joshua Lawson, a spokesperson with the State Board of Elections.
There was also a problem at a precinct in Lincoln County. Two voters there complained that rolling power outages, each lasting 25 minutes, held up the voting process.
By the time board members arrived to that issue, it was 7:30 p.m. and polls were closed and it was too late to decide anything in that particular case.
As far as voter turnout, many people experienced long lines at their precincts. At one precinct in Durham, the line was so long at 7:30 p.m. that it took until almost 9 p.m. to get everything through to vote.
The leader of the North Carolina NAACP blamed the long lines to Republican-led legislature decision to cut back early voting time.
"People are standing and they're not going anywhere. It's wrong for them to have to do that," said Barber. "Make sure we have plenty of time for early voting so that people don't have to stand in lines like this."
Mid-term voter participation in North Carolina set a new record. As of 10:34 p.m., 2,717,920 voters had cast ballots. In 2010, turnout was 2,700,393.
"We are pleased that more than 2.7 million voters made such a strong statement for the democratic process -increasing early participation by over 20 percent and besting the state's prior midterm record," said Executive Director Kim Strach. "We commend the counties for their hard work and commitment on behalf of voters in our state."
Eight percent of precincts were unreported as of 10:34 p.m.
