CHICAGO (AP) – One of the most anticipated primaries in Illinois history included scattered voting problems Tuesday, including a handful of Chicago voters who were told incorrectly that they could cast their ballots in invisible ink.

Voters filling out paper ballots at a Chicago precinct were given styluses used for touchscreen voting instead of ink pens, Chicago Board of Elections spokesman Jim Allen said. When the voters indicated they couldn’t mark their ballots, they were told the pens used invisible ink.

“The voters believed that and when they cast their ballots the machines spit them out, and the judge overrode it,” Allen said. “As far as we can tell, he believed it.”

After 20 people experienced the same problem, “somebody said, ‘Wait, we’ve got 20 ballots where nobody’s voted for anything,'” Allen said.

By late afternoon, officials had contacted five of the 20 voters and were waiting to hear from the others.

Election officials otherwise reported only minor problems across the state, according to Dan White, executive director of the Illinois State Board of Elections.

Allen said 2,570 Chicago precincts opened on time, though a few did not — including one that opened at approximately 6:20 a.m. because four judges did not show up. But he said officials were confident no voters had been turned away.

City officials asked a judge to allow one precinct to stay open an additional hour because voting equipment had been delivered to the wrong location. A judge allowed two other polling places to stay open an extra hour due to late start times, said Gail Siegel, spokeswoman for Cook County Clerk David Orr.

One of the precincts did not open until 7:15 a.m. because a poll workers failed to show up and the other, at a school, did not open until about 7 a.m., apparently because a door could not be unlocked until then.

Orr noted small problems at a handful of other precincts, such as judges mistakenly closing a poll — essentially turning off a voting machine — and the system not allowing it to be reopened. New machines were rushed to the polling places.

“We don’t think we lost any voters,” Orr said.

McLean County Clerk PeggyAnn Milton said voting in the central Illinois county anchored by Bloomington had gone smoothly, with only a few minor problems. An optical scan voting machine went out in a rural part of the county but was fixed quickly.

She did note a quirk in the county’s ballot colors: yellow for Republicans, green for Democrats and blue for the Green Party. She said local election officials may talk about changing the color scheme after the primary.

In southern Illinois, Jackson County Clerk Larry Reinhardt knew of few issues. A couple of Carbondale school polling places were briefly without power in the morning but that didn’t affect any votes, he said.

———

Associated Press Writer Ryan Keith contributed to this report.