WASHINGTON: In a freak incident, a ballot scanner in the US state of Iowa stopped working after getting moisture from voters applying hand sanitiser, leading to a disruption in polling, a media report said.
The voters who applied hand sanitiser caused excess moisture to get into the machine and put it out of commission for about an hour in Iowa's Des Moines, New York Daily News quoted spokesperson for the Iowa secretary of state Kevin Hall as saying.
The hand sanitiser dispenser was moved away so that voters' hands would be drier when they got up to the ballot scanners, in a bid to prevent the issue from recurring.
Iowa has seen a surge in coronavirus cases recently and has reported nearly 135,000 cases since March.
According to Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker, the coronavirus has so far infected more than 47 million people and killed over 1.2 million people globally.
The US is the worst affected country with over 9.3 million cases and 232,000 deaths.