Voting in Broward County, Florida, stalled almost as soon as it started on Election Day. Polls opened at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, November 3, and within minutes a barcode check-in feature in the county's voting system began wrongly telling voters and poll workers that voters had been given the wrong ballot. Nobody had. The feature was meant to do the opposite — to confirm electronically that each voter was getting the correct ballot — but its malfunction blocked check-in at several polling places until technicians fixed it at about 7:20 a.m., roughly 20 minutes after polls opened, Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said. Scott apologised to voters who had to wait, said some people left before they could vote, and urged everyone who walked away to come back to their assigned polling place before polls close at 7 p.m.

Source: Associated Press (Nov. 3, 2026)

The clearest account of the mechanism comes from Scott's own statement and the local reporting it drew on. The problem, Florida's Voice reported, involved a barcode-scanning system designed to make sure voters in precincts affected by redistricting receive the correct ballot: the system incorrectly flagged some ballots as incorrect, blocking check-in at multiple sites until technicians resolved it. WSVN described a systemwide issue that affected polling sites for between 10 and 15 minutes, while Scott's office put the full resolution at within 20 minutes of polls opening. The Associated Press independently reported the same core facts: a new voting-system safety feature malfunctioned, voting was delayed for 20 minutes, the problem was solved by 7:20 a.m., and Scott apologised and encouraged those who left to return, without giving an estimate of how many people left.

Source: Local 10 / Florida's Voice / WSVN via The Digital Free Press (Nov. 3, 2026)

What the supervisor said

“Nobody voted on the wrong ballot,” Scott said, in remarks reported by Florida's Voice citing a Miami Herald report, and he said no votes already cast were affected and none of the counts were impacted. In his written statement, Scott said the issue “did not affect any votes cast,” that the office had used the same feature “successfully during the primary election in August without any problems,” and that poll workers are also trained to manually verify that voters receive the correct ballots — so the electronic check was an additional safeguard, not the only one. “I know some of you had to leave before you could cast your ballot,” he said, urging those voters to return to their assigned polling place before polls close at 7 p.m.

The Republican National Committee's election-integrity account, @RNCVoteProtect, posted at 9:51 a.m. that “the issue causing delays is FIXED. EVERY VOTER WILL GET A BALLOT. EVERY VOTE WILL COUNT,” and said precincts were manually ensuring voters could cast their proper ballots, with RNC observers on the ground and in contact with the Supervisor of Elections. That cross-check matters: both the Democratic-run county elections office and Republican observers were telling voters the same two things on Tuesday morning — the fault was fixed, and a ballot cast on Tuesday would be counted.

The places voters named

Local 10 News reported problems at locations including the Sunset Lakes Community Center in Miramar, Coconut Palm Elementary School and South Plantation High School. At Sunset Lakes, voters began lining up as early as 6:15 a.m., with dozens waiting outside before the doors opened, the station reported. One voter told the station poll workers announced they were having technical difficulties and could not access the registration system: “They have problems, electronic problems, and they can't log into the system,” the voter said, adding that technicians were working on it. Those first-in-line voters are exactly the group Scott was addressing — people who arrived before work, waited, and in some cases had to leave for jobs, school runs or shifts.

Why a redistricting safeguard misfired

The background is redistricting. When precinct boundaries are redrawn, neighbouring voters can legitimately be entitled to different ballots, and handing someone the wrong ballot style is a real election-administration error — which is why Broward added an electronic confirmation step. The irony of Tuesday morning is that the safeguard itself became the obstacle: it flagged correct ballots as incorrect, and because it sat at check-in, voters could not move forward until it was fixed or worked around manually. Scott's office says the same feature ran without problems through the August primary, which is why the Election Day failure is best read, on the evidence available, as a technical malfunction — no source reporting on Tuesday alleged that votes were altered, miscounted or cast on wrong ballots, and both the elections office and RNC observers explicitly said the opposite.

A second Broward headache the same morning

Separately — and separately reported by this site as part of the wider Florida flooding story — the Supervisor's office also moved two Broward polling places because of severe flooding: Precinct T018 in Davie moved from the Paradise Village Clubhouse, 12850 W. State Road 84, to Tree Tops Park, 3900 SW 100th Ave. (Precinct T013), and Precinct E010 in Coral Springs moved from the Mullins Park–Sartory Senior Center to Mullins Hall, 10170 NW 29th St. Those moves were about water, not the barcode fault, but for a Broward voter on Tuesday they landed together: check your assigned place, expect possible changes, and go before 7 p.m.

Turnout context shows why a 20-minute morning blockage is not a trivial story. County officials were expecting a large turnout, with more than 450,000 voters having already cast ballots before Election Day and about 225,000 more expected at the polls on Tuesday, WSVN reported. By 10 a.m., approximately 45,000 people had already voted in the county on Election Day itself, according to local reporting carried by Cuba Headlines — a pace that underlines how many voters pass through Broward polling places in the first hours, and therefore how many can be affected when check-in stops at 7 a.m. sharp, the busiest arrival window of the day.

What happens next

No extension of Broward voting hours was announced in the reporting checked on Tuesday, so the remedy on offer is the one Scott stated: return before the 7 p.m. close, and if you are in line at 7 p.m., stay in line. The practical impact falls hardest on voters who cannot easily return — shift workers, carers, and the long-distance and trucking workforce that makes up a large share of South Florida's Punjabi and wider diaspora readership of this site, for whom a second trip to a polling place can mean a lost route or a lost shift. After polls close, the questions that remain are administrative, not about Tuesday's counts: how many voters left and did not return (Scott said he did not have an estimate), why a feature that worked in August failed under Election Day load, and what the county changes before the next election. Those answers will come, if they come, from the Supervisor's post-election review — not from speculation on Election Day.