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'Great' Election Day in Palm Beach County with no major equipment or harassment issues, officials say

Roughly 75% of registered voters in Palm Beach County have cast their ballots
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Posted at 5:52 AM, Nov 03, 2020
and last updated 2020-11-03 23:10:35-05

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Describing it as a "great" day with no major issues, Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link says roughly 75% of registered voters in the county cast their ballots for Tuesday's election.

"Our goal for Palm Beach County was to ensure a smooth, transparent, safe election. We feel like we did that," Link said.

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Link said the initial election results that came in shortly after 7 p.m. were from the more than 600,000 mail-in and early voting ballots that had been counted over the last couple of weeks.

The Supervisor of Elections said there were no major issues with voting equipment on Tuesday.

"We did have a couple reports of paper jams and some jams with the equipment, which we were able to fix," Link said. "We always have two, a minimum of two pieces of equipment at each polling location so we can always go to the second one."

Link said new high-speed tabulators which replaced outdated tabulators that malfunctioned during the 2018 election have been "working wonderfully," and she expects that to continue throughout the night.

There were no problems with voter intimidation or harassment on Tuesday, Link said.

"The voters of Palm Beach County were rocking it today. Everybody was very respectful of one another," Link said. "The campaigns, we're told, were getting along really well."

Link added that she doesn't expect there to be a record voter turnout in Palm Beach County, and mail-in ballots "by far" represent the highest percentage of total ballots, mainly due to concerns over COVID-19.

"There was a lot of people who did not want to come out in public and be in the lines with people voting," Link said.

In order to accommodate all voters, Palm Beach County kept all voting locations and dropbox sites open until 7 p.m. Tuesday.

You can track the status of your ballot by clicking here.