North Carolina Announces Delay in Results After Extending Voting Hours Following Technical Issues

The key battleground state of North Carolina will delay reporting the results for the 2020 elections after several precincts experienced technical issues with their printers.

In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, the North Carolina State Board of Elections announced it had extended voting times for four precincts, which means the state will not begin reporting results until at least 8:15 p.m.

The state extended voting by 17 minutes for the First Missionary Baptist Church location in Cabarrus County after that location opened late “due to an issue with the onsite printer.”

Voting at the Bluford Elementary School in Greensboro will be extended 34-minutes. And the Plainview Fire Station precinct will receive the longest extension of 45-minutes and will close at 8:15 p.m.

Polls were initially scheduled to close at 7:30 p.m., but with the extensions, the results will now be delayed at least 45-minutes.

However, the board of elections said, “Once all polling places are closed statewide, election results will begin to post.”

Additionally, the board said, “With 2,660 polling sites, it is not unusual for minor issues to occur at polling sites that result in a brief disruption of voting.”

Earlier in the day, an official at Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told reporters that the vast most interruptions in voting are not the result of cyber-intrusions and that the latter is very unlikely.

“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,” the official told reporters of glitches in polling locations around the country.

The official added, “Based on everything we have seen, that is what is going on out there.”

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf also said at a press conference, “Let me be clear, our election infrastructure is resilient, we have no indication that a foreign actor has succeeded in compromising or affecting the actual votes cast in this election.”