All 44 new electronic poll machines that were supposed to help citizens speed through the check in process at polling precincts failed Tuesday in Pennington County. The massive failure caused major delays in voting — and vote counting. And the glitch hit other counties in the state as well. This election was the first one that the new Electronic Pollbooks were used in every Pennington County precinct. They worked fine during a Rapid City water rate election this year but at 6 a.m. Tuesday election officials knew they had a problem. Poll workers reported that their machines were “timing out” and had to get repeatedly rebooted. They switched to backup paper logs but in 16 precincts the paper logs weren’t on hand and had to be delivered from the County Auditors office.
Voting was halted until the backup logs could be delivered. Poll hours were extended and at some locations extended all the way to 8:45 p.m.
… The software crash, blamed partly on faulty Wi-fi connectivity, also hit in Hughes, Brown, Brookings, Yankton, Sully, Hyde and Potter counties, according to George Munro with BPro, a Pierre-based company whose TotalVote software was adopted for the state’s election system and built the Electronic PollBooks.
Full Article: Software failure mars election night here and in 8 other counties.