Somerset County’s primary election polls may have closed Tuesday night at 8 p.m., but the results were not posted online until Wednesday morning.
With several county districts experiencing malfunctioning machines and a few close races (including a nine-vote difference in a Branchburg race), County Clerk Brett Radi explained, “I didn’t post them because we still had some ballots that needed to be added. I didn’t want to have results that didn’t reflect what was really going on.”
“We just didn’t do a final update, because we didn’t have the ‘emergencies’ [emergency ballots used when machines malfunction],” he noted.
A total of six districts in Branchburg, Bridgewater, Bernardsville and Warren reported malfunctioning machines. Bridgewater Township Clerk Linda Doyle confirmed that one machine in District 16 was not operating correcting and was replaced by the Somerset County Board of Elections. Until the new machine arrived, emergency ballots were utilized.
The emergency ballots had to be counted manually and added to the machines’ totals.
Full Article: Malfunctioning Voting Machines Delay Primary Results – Basking Ridge, NJ Patch.