Durham delays release of election results

Durham County will delay the release of election results this evening for an hour, after one of the county's polling sites opened late this morning.

Meanwhile, a midday bomb scare at another voting site isn't expected to have any impact on the results.

Precinct #23 at The River Church on Holt School Road will remain open an hour after the rest of the polls have closed, elections director Mike Ashe said this morning. Voting in Durham's 55 other precincts will end at 7:30 p.m., while #23 will remain open until 8:30 p.m.

The county will not release any results until 8:31 p.m., Ashe said.

"We should not put out one result until all our polls are closed," he said.

Ashe said the delay should not affect the tabulation of votes and that he expects to have final results by 9:30 p.m. as usual.

Precinct #23 could not open at 6:30 a.m. because the church was locked, Ashe said. About 100 voters were waiting, and some drove to Board of Elections headquarters on Corporation Street to cast their votes. In the May primary, 25 percent of the 3,945 registered voters in the precinct turned out to vote.

The bomb threat forced the evacuation of Neal Middle School, a voting precinct in eastern Durham. School children, poll workers and three voters were forced to wait in the parking lot for 30 minutes while sheriff's deputies swept the school, Ashe said. Voting resumed once the school was deemed safe, and the three voters cast their ballots, as did two others who had arrived during the evacuation, Ashe said.

The voting machine that counts the votes was stored in a locked room during the evacuation, Ashe said.