Snow, Lines, and Malfunctions Cause Montana Election Results Delay
It was a looong election night and the day after for Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton and the team in Helena as they waited throughout Wednesday for votes to come in. According to Statpleton there were lots of delays.
"Each thing is just different," Stapleton said. "We had really, really long lines. A lot of same-day voter registration, which puts a lot of pressure on the local clerks in several places, certainly in the college towns, We didn't get to counting votes till around 10:30 at night in some of these places. Usually, we'd be done by midnight but that's when some of these places were just getting started."
Some cities had unique problems.
"In Missoula we had some equipment issues, as I understand it, with our big counting machines, we call them the 850's, basically, that's how we aggregate all of the results. I believe we have three big ones over there and one of them is down. The fix was delayed because of weather, actually. The civilian technician was driving from Butte and there were weather delays."
On Wednesday, just after 8:00 Stapleton says nearly all the slowest areas to report were big cities and around 70,000 votes were still left to be counted.
Despite the delays, Stapleton says he hadn’t heard of any malicious problems like voter fraud popping up yet.