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Voters take to paper ballots as voting machines in Georgia's Spalding County face glitches

The local officials have traced back the glitch to a group of Spalding County workers who loaded information onto the poll pads incorrectly

SPALDING COUNTY, GEORGIA: Several residents made a beeline to their nearest polling booth with hopes of casting their vote for their candidate of choice. Unfortunately, several voters were in for a rude shock when they reached the polling booth. Due to some technical glitch, all the voting machines across Spalding County were down. Election officials in the county have confirmed the presence of a glitch that caused havoc across several polling booths on November 3 morning. The local officials have traced back the glitch to a group of Spalding County workers who reportedly loaded information onto the poll pads incorrectly. Their error led to voting machines across the county to shut down.

The county's voting machines have been procured from Dominion Voting Systems Corporation, a company that is known for selling electronic voting hardware and software. Spalding County Board of Elections Chairman, Margaret Bentley, said, "All I can tell you is Dominion — the company that installed the voting machines — did an update overnight and caused a glitch in the system, and therefore the machines were not working." 

But the voters were determined to cast their vote, so they waited in long queues to cast their vote on provisional ballots. Voters had to resort to voting on paper ballot before the glitch could be fixed. Marcia Ridley, Spalding County Election Supervisor, advised the voters to be patient and reassured them that they would all be able to cast their ballots. She also declared that they had no plans of staying open past 7 pm unless ordered by a court.

Even Ohio's most populous county, Franklin County, was forced to switch to paper poll books for voter check-ins, due to some technical difficulties. Secretary Frank LaRose reportedly directed every board of elections to have paper pollbooks as a contingency plan to ensure the integrity of the system and that no voter can get to vote twice. He insisted that the glitch hasn't impacted the security or accuracy of voting and that it only affected how voters were checked in.