[ad_1]
The processing of ballots for Fulton County, Georgia, was delayed for a full two hours Tuesday after a water pipe exploded in a room containing ballots.
Election officials said Tuesday night that the ballots were not damaged.
County officials declared successful efforts to speed up the vote count, but the delay shattered their expectations of at least three-quarters of the vote as of 11 p.m.
“There was a tube that exploded in the room where the ballots were, and thank goodness none of those ballots were damaged,” said Dwight Brauer of the Fulton County Board of Elections.
Fulton Commission Chairman Rob Bates, for his part, said the tube exploded at 6:07 am.
Election officials expect to count the results of the majority of the votes Tuesday night, including the nearly 315,000 personal votes anticipated.
“It would be late for what we wanted,” said Ralph Jones, Fulton’s senior elections director, in response to when the public will know.
As of 5 p.m., Jones said, the Board of Elections had surveyed 86,191 of the 130,517 mailed ballots that did not include the ballots in the day’s mail.
For his part, a member of the Electoral Board, Mark Wingate, said they will not have the final results of the vote until the end of this week.
“We may not know anything before Friday,” he said, adding that they would stop counting the ballots at 10:30 pm.
The official did not explain why Fulton stopped counting absentee votes at that particular time, saying only that that was procedure.
“As planned, Fulton County will continue to schedule the remaining absentee ballots for the next two days.”
Absentee ballot processing requires opening each ballot, verifying the signatures, and scanning the ballot papers.
This is a more time-consuming scheduling process compared to other forms of voting.
“Fulton County did not expect all absentee ballots to be processed on Election Day,” a county spokeswoman wrote in a statement.
