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An unknown number of county election offices in Georgia were forced to use manual methods to verify early primary voters Monday after the Secretary of State’s voter-verification system went on the fritz–again.
The ElectioNet or eNet system was down for about three hours on Monday morning but was back up by about 11 a.m., a Secretary of State’s office spokesperson told Atlanta Civic Circle. Early voting for the May 24 midterm primary ends Friday.
“It was real slow this morning,” the spokesperson said, adding that eNet’s temporary glitch “shouldn’t have impacted any offices,” because county elections offices have backup verifications methods.
A staffer in the Secretary of State’s elections division informed local election officials via email just before 11:00 a.m. on Monday that the office was “aware that eNet is temporarily unavailable for some users.”
County elections offices were instructed to use backup voter rolls, EasyVote (election-management software from an outside vendor) if available, or to manually look up each voter on their My Voter Page on the Secretary of State’s website.
The slowdown wasn’t due to “anything sinister,” but because eNet’s website certification was out of date, the Secretary of State’s office spokesperson said. “It had nothing to do with the election. Our certifications for the websites were being renewed. It’s a pretty routine process.”
Monday’s glitch comes less than two weeks after eNet experienced a temporary outage on May 5, forcing election workers to use backup voter rolls or the My Voter Page to sign in voters and assign them ballots, a time-consuming process that led to long lines and voter frustration.
The glitches, while vexatious, don’t appear to have affected voter turnout.
As of Sunday, some 416,558 Georgians had cast early or absentee ballots–more than twice the number cast during the same period in the 2018 midterm primaries. About 33,000 of those were absentee ballots. Georgia has about 7.7 million registered voters.
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