Georgia officials say abnormal company update caused a glitch that halted machine voting for hours in two counties

Officials admitted that voting was halted in two counties in Georgia over a glitch that was caused by an update to their system that was made the night before the election.

It is important to note that there is not yet any allegation that votes were lost or tampered with in either county, or that voters in either county were unable to vote.

The temporary countywide outage caused voting machines to be inoperable for several hours in Spalding County, but officials were able to get the machines running by 10 a.m. During the time that they were trying to fix the problem, officials had voters use paper ballots instead.

A similar issue in Morgan County forced officials to use paper ballots there as well, which delayed some voters.

"The lines are a bit longer than we would like," said Elections Director Jennifer Doran according to WAGA-TV. "We are asking voters to be patient while we work to get everyone voted."

Officials later said that the glitch was due to an update made to the machine systems that was made on Monday evening.

Spalding County Board of Election elections supervisor Marcia Ridley admitted that the update was abnormal.

"That is something that they don't ever do. I've never seen them update anything the day before the election," Ridley said to Politico.

Both of the counties used voting machines purchased from Dominion Voting Systems Corporation. The 2020 election was the first statewide contest using the new system purchased by Georgia for $100 million in 2019.

In order to give voters enough time to cast their ballot after the delays caused by the glitch, the voting deadline was extended to 11 p.m. by Superior Court Judge W. Fletcher Sams.

Georgia's Secretary of State said that the average wait time for most voters was about 3 minutes on election day, with some waiting for an hour only because of elderly voters needing assistance.

TheBlaze reached out to election officials in both counties but neither responded in time for publication.

The voting results for both counties appear to be similar to results from the 2016 election. Morgan County went for Trump by a margin of 70-30 in the 2016. In 2020, he actually performed better in Morgan County, winning 71 percent of the vote to Biden's 27 percent. Spalding County went for Trump by a margin of 60-35 in 2016, and went for Trump by a margin of 60-38 in 2020.

The U.S. Senate race in Georgia was still undecided on Friday and headed towards a runoff election. The outcome of that election could decide whether the Senate stays in Republican control or switches to the Democrats.

Here's some of the problems in Georgia on election day:

Some central Georgia voters report issues at the polls on Election Daywww.youtube.com