If you are one of thousands heading to the polls today to cast your ballot, you will have to wait a little longer for results.
Elections Nova Scotia says, due to a delayed opening at a polling station on the Eastern Shore, results will take an additional hour, Tuesday night.
Votes at other locations will be counted at 8 p.m., when their polls close, but results will not go live until 9 p.m. Tuesday, when the site in Mushaboom closes.
Site crashes
Meanwhile, if you are having trouble finding out where you can vote, you are not alone.
Naomi Shelton, from Elections Nova Scotia tells our newsroom, it has been extremely busy Tuesday morning.
“We’re experiencing higher than usual volumes on both our call centre and our website, and it caused our website to crash momentarily this morning. So, we did work with the ICT services to increase that capacity.”
Shelton adds, before even going into the election, they did the work to increase capacity, but it still wasn’t enough.
Call centre also taking awhile
If you are calling in, to find out where to vote, you can expect that to also take a bit longer.
“We’re asking voters to be patient and keep trying, that when they get through to the call centre, they can help you.”
Shelton did not have specifics on how long that wait time would be.
No voter information cards
This year was the first time voter information cards were not mailed out, due to the postal strike.
Shelton says this was a setback.
“Unfortunately, it’s an anomaly this time, to not have them because of the postal strike. Because really, the day the strike started, November 15 was about the first day those cards could have been hitting mailboxes. What we could have ended up having was a disparity across the province where some regions received cards, [and] some didn’t.”
However, she says, they are not necessary.
Shelton says the website is back up and running now but they will continue to monitor it throughout the day.
