CHICAGO, Nov. 6 (UPI) -- Chicago voters looking for polling place information online Tuesday were hindered when the city's elections website went down for hours.
The Chicago Tribune reported the Board of Elections website crashed in the early morning and didn't come back up until about 4 p.m.
"We are investigating the possibility that our website problems this morning were caused by a malicious attack," board spokesman Langdon Neal said. "We were overwhelmed by hits, and we know that a significant portion of them did not come from individual voters asking to find their polling place."
Neal said many of the requests appeared to be coming from computer servers.
"We can tell by the way the requests are coming in and the volume," James Allen, another board spokesman, said. "It's behaving like a computer program and not like people with legitimate questions."
The Board of Elections had recorded 864 instances in which Chicago voters went to the wrong polling place as of mid-afternoon. About one-fifth of Cook County voters were looking for new polling sites because of this year's redistricting, the newspaper said.
