The Town of Barnstable is extending voting till midnight following a gradual begin to their day when the county’s clerk was unable to open the locked vault that saved ballots.
“Due to the delayed opening caused by the inability of the town clerk to access ballots in the town vault, polling hours were extended to ensure there were 13 voting hours in Barnstable today,” the city wrote at a 3:15 p.m. replace to its Facebook web page.
The clerk’s workplace had tried to open the vault with the election ballots at 4:15 a.m., the city wrote on its Facebook web page, however was unable to take action. By 8:45 a.m., the city had begun printing emergency paper ballots whereas “work crews continue to work on the vault.”
These ballots, they wrote, are “identical to machine-readable ballots but will need to be hand-counted at the end of the night.”
Those emergency ballots had been distributed to polling areas by 11, stated Debra O’Malley, spokeswoman with the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s workplace. Polling locations had opened on time however with none ballots accessible, she stated.
Since the polls had been alleged to be open 4 hours earlier, the Secretary of the Commonwealth pursued a court docket order to increase voting there till midnight to make sure everybody had time to vote. The remainder of the commonwealth will nonetheless shut voting at 8 p.m.
That order was granted at round 2:30 p.m. in Suffolk Superior Court.
The approach it labored, O’Malley defined, is that the Secretary of the Commonwealth basically sued the city, however clearly the city welcomed it and was “amenable to it,” because it granted them what they wished — a full day’s voting interval.
The elections division of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s workplace tweeted that the vault couldn’t open due to a “mechanical issue” and that crews had been engaged on it.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”