Hours-long lines and malfunctioning voting machines at many precincts faced voters on Election Day in Georgia, where the hotly contested governor’s race was marred by allegations of voter suppression.
At a senior living complex in Atlanta, the line of voters standing in the rain stretched around the building.
In Gwinnett County, which includes parts of suburban Atlanta, glitchy polling machines forced poll workers to pass out provisional paper ballots until the devices could be replaced.
One person said nearly 30 people who had come to vote in her precinct gave up after seeing the long lines.
“We’ve been trying to tell them to wait, but people have children. People are getting hungry. People are tired,” Ontaria Woods told the Associated Press.
She said others rejected the paper ballots because they “don’t trust it.”
At a polling place in Snellville, more than 100 people alternated sitting in children’s chairs and on the floor while they waited in line for hours.
Joe Sorenson, a spokesman for the county’s supervisor of elections, blamed the wait on problems with voter access cards.
Inaccurate machines caused delays in Texas and North Carolina, while voter registration problems were reported in Tennessee and Georgia.
Voters in South Carolina said machines at some polling places “flipped” their vote, according to a report Tuesday.
The voters complained after they said their candidate picks, including in the governor’s race, did not match those on their final ballot submission, CBS station WLTX reported.
Georgia’s gubernatorial race is one of the most closely watched elections in the country as Democrat Stacey Abrams hopes to become the nation’s first African-American female governor.
Her race against Secretary of State Brian Kemp has been highlighted by accusations that he has taken steps to try to suppress the minority vote, accusations he dismissed as a “farce.”
With Post wires
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