Civil rights groups and election officials fielded thousands of reports of voting irregularities across the country Tuesday, with voters complaining of broken machines, long lines and untrained poll workers improperly challenging Americans’ right to vote.

The loudest of those complaints came from Georgia, where issues of race, ballot access and election fairness have fueled an acrimonious governor’s contest between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp. Abrams, a former state lawmaker, is vying to be the nation’s first-ever black woman governor, while Kemp, the secretary of state who oversees elections, has faced accusations of trying to suppress the minority vote.

In one downtown Atlanta precinct, voters waited three hours to cast ballots after local election officials initially sent only three voting machines to serve more than 3,000 registered voters. In suburban Gwinnett County, the wait surpassed four hours, as election officials opened the polls only to discover that their voting machines weren’t working at all, voters said.

Both locations serve predominantly African-American voters, feeding worries among some voters that specific groups were being disenfranchised amid signs of record turnout for a midterm.

“Look at the people here,” said Gabe Okoye, chairman of the Gwinnett County Democratic Party, as he watched mostly black voters enter and exit the voting location. “See the demography of these voters.”

“If you’re going to play tricks anywhere, you’re going to do it here,” he added, noting the importance of the populous county to the final vote count.

The spike in reports of voting problems also coincided with heightened enthusiasm across the country to participate in this year’s races, with early voting tallies in dozens of states far outpacing those of 2014.

On Tuesday, elections officials in states including Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, Indiana and Georgia extended voting hours to contend with long lines outside polling locations. Some states, including North Dakota, were also contending with low supplies of ballots and voters still standing in line by Tuesday evening.

Reports of broken machines surfaced in numerous states, including New York, California and Arizona. Complaints also emerged of voting machines flipping voters’ choices in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Texas and Illinois.

In New York, Corey Johnson, the speaker of the New York City Council, said the voting precincts were hampered by broken scanners in all five boroughs. Voters stood in lines with ballots in the rain – soaking the ballots and further complicating the process of using electronic scanners.

Across the country, reports about huge turnout were punctuated with complaints about voters who faced obstacles to casting their ballots.

Voters with limited English proficiency in the Houston area said that they were being blocked from bringing an interpreter with them to vote, as required under the Voting Rights Act, according to civil rights groups.

Hector DeLeon, a spokesman for Harris County, which includes Houston, said he was not aware of complaints from non-English speakers about bringing interpreters.

In North Dakota, a voting rights lawyer said dozens of Native American voters were being turned away because of issues with their identification.

Accusations of intimidation surfaced after U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced plans to run a “crowd-control” exercise near a Hispanic neighborhood in El Paso Tuesday – the hometown of Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a closely contested race in Texas.

On Tuesday morning, the agency abruptly canceled the exercise after critics raised concerns about voter suppression.

The epicenter of voting anxiety was in Georgia, where the bitter gubernatorial contest has played out as an emotional battle over voting rights.

One voting rights group, Protect Democracy, filed a suit late Tuesday demanding that Kemp be pulled from his duties overseeing Georgia’s elections.

Tensions mounted in the weeks before Election Day after the revelation that thousands of voter registration applications had been suspended, most of them for people of color or immigrants, under a new state law requiring an exact match between the application and driver or Social Security records. Separately, hundreds of absentee ballots were challenged by officials, many in the minority-heavy Gwinett County.

On Tuesday, voters at one polling location in Gwinett County reported a wait of more than four hours to cast their ballots.

“This was voter suppression at its finest,” said Takeya Sneeze, an African-American truck driver who said she watched 100 voters leave a polling location at an elementary school without casting ballots after discovering the machines weren’t working.

Sneeze said she went to Walmart twice to get water and snacks to encourage people to stay in line and wait.

Joe Sorenson, a spokesman for Gwinnett County, said voting at the elementary school would be extended 25 minutes, but any further extension would require a judge’s order.

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