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ALBANY, GA --
Tuesday night only 14% of voters showed up in Dougherty County and the elections office experienced major technical difficulties.

After polls had closed in Tuesday’s presidential primary, electronic cards holding each vote had to be read through one of two voting machines used for that purpose. Unfortunately, those two machines froze, unable to read the cards.

“And the tech support was on the phone with Omaha which is the ESNS corporate office,” says Elections Supervisor Ginger Nickerson.

One of the machines eventually unfroze, but it still took hours for that one machine to read all 155 voter cards.

Elections officials then tried sending partial results to the Secretary of State’s office, but something went wrong with their modem, halting them in their tracks.

Fortunately, results were saved on a flash drive and sent via email through a secure website around 12:30 Wednesday morning.

Nickerson says they’re still investigating the modem problem, as well as the machines that read voter cards. Those machines had even been tested several times before election day.

“The server was turned on last week on Wednesday, a test file was sent on Friday, March second, a second test file was sent on Monday March fifth, just on election night, that file would not send,” says Nickerson.

They'll continue to investigate so they'll be ready for the July elections.