Voters in Mercer County, New Jersey, may face a longer-than-expected wait to cast their ballots on Election Day after an "issue" with voting machines caused a "county-wide system outage" that local government officials said resulted in "all voting machines" going down.
Voting machines are currently down, vote on a standard ballot https://t.co/TXVP7Cy8lQ
— West Windsor Police (@westwindsorpd) November 8, 2022
A notice released by West Windsor officials explained the issue:
WEST WINDSOR RESIDENTS: DUE TO A MERCER COUNTY-WIDE SYSTEM OUTAGE, ALL VOTING MACHINES ARE CURRENTLY DOWN IN EACH DISTRICT ACROSS THE COUNTY. VOTERS CAN STILL REPORT TO THEIR RESPECTIVE POLLING LOCATIONS AND VOTE ON A STANDARD BALLOT AND INSERT THEIR BALLOT INTO THE EMERGENCY SLOT IN THE MACHINE.
Meanwhile, Mercer County county posted on its Facebook page acknowledging the "issues with voting machines."
Despite the outage affecting the county that includes the state capital of Trenton, officials say that voters will still be allowed to cast a paper "standard ballot" and poll workers "will be on hand to walk voters through the process" that reportedly includes inserting "their ballot into the emergency slot in the machine."
The county also shared its board of elections "is working with Dominion, the machine maker, to resolve the issue."
New Jersey Republican Party Executive Director Tom Szymanski said in a statement that, "in spite of reported problems with scanners on voting machines in Mercer County, this issue does not affect their voting experience at all," adding that "[v]oters will still enter their polling place, cast their vote, and insert the paper ballot into the machine as they normally would." Szymanski said voters should be "assured that NJGOP is ensuring voters' rights are protected at all phases of the process and that their vote counts."
As Townhall reported earlier on Election Day, there have also been issues with voting at dozens of polling places in Maricopa County, Arizona, where ballots are being "misread" by tabulators. And as Katie noted, last-minute changes in Pennsylvania are already delaying vote counting in the Keystone State.
Editor's note: This story was updated to include a statement from the New Jersey Republican Party.