An election happened in Luzerne County on Tuesday, but for two hours after the polls closed the results could only be found on a projection screen at the county courthouse. An apparent traffic overload periodically crashed the county’s usually reliable website, www.luzernecounty.org, and prevented officials from posting results. The outage forced reporters, some candidates and other interested parties to the courthouse rotunda to watch a scroll of results. The top county races, for controller and the county council, shared equal time on the screen with school board races and the campaigns for municipal councils. Some reporters used their cellphones and compact camera to take pictures of the screen to freeze the fast-moving results.
County mapping director David T. Skoronski said an overload of traffic prevented him from even posting results to the website.
“I can’t put the content out there because it’s dogging for the content manager,” Skoronski said at the height of the outage. “It’s just dogging. So many people are hitting it, it just times out.”
The election bureau also provided results to media outlets via email and on a USB drive. The website eventually returned around 10:30 p.m. with full unofficial results, albeit slower than normal.
Full Article: Technical difficulties cause election havoc – News – Citizens’ Voice.