Voting briefly extended in Louisville, Kentucky, after traffic delays cap mostly smooth Election Day

After a crowd had amassed outside the Kentucky Exposition Center, a judge extended voting hours by 30 minutes, allowing more than 100 people who were waiting outside the building to vote. The doors were then closed again.

"We did unlock the doors and we let everybody in and had them go vote," Jefferson County election spokesman Nore Ghibaudy told CNN.

The doors had briefly re-opened after Charles Booker, the Democrat facing Amy McGrath in a closely watched Senate primary there, asked a court to extend voting hours until 9 p.m., citing traffic going to the Expo Center. McGrath later tweeted that she too was filing an injunction seeking to keep the polls open in Louisville, and it was not immediately clear if a judge would further extend voting hours.

It came at the conclusion of mostly smooth primaries held in Kentucky and New York on Tuesday, as both states adjusted to the coronavirus pandemic and largely conducted their elections by mail.

The disastrous primary days that have occurred in other states, including Wisconsin, where lines stretched for several blocks throughout Milwaukee, and Georgia and Nevada, where voters waited in line for hours, did not seem to materialize on Tuesday.

"So far, this has been a very successful election," Kentucky Republican secretary of state Michael Adams said at a state Board of Elections meeting Tuesday. "Things are going great. Voters are really happy. I think they're a little relieved that this process has been so easy for them today, that we're getting a big thumbs up given the dire predictions over the weekend."

As the state grappled with massive shortages of poll workers, Kentucky's two largest cities each consolidated down to one massive polling place -- the Kentucky Convention Center in Louisville and the University of Kentucky football team's Kroger Field in Lexington.

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By midday, lines in Lexington stretched for about an hour, according to local media reports and voters who posted about their wait times on social media. Officials added more check-in stations as the day went on in hopes of shortening those waits.

Booker's campaign said that in Louisville, the delay wasn't the line to vote -- but rather getting to the Expo Center.

"For hours, we've been hearing reports that people are stuck in hour-long lines to park their car before they can vote," Colin Lauderdale, Booker's campaign manager, said in a statement. "We're fully committed to ensuring that each one of those people can vote, which is why we're filing an emergency petition to extend voting hours. We need to keep the only polling location in Louisville open, because every single voice deserves to be heard and everyone who wants to should be able to cast their ballot."

Voting was steady throughout the day at the Exposition Center, a sprawling building designed to allow hundreds of people to cast ballots at once and be socially distant from one another. Several voters told CNN they finished the entire voting process in 10 to 15 minutes.

It wasn't until the final moments before the polls closed when more people arrived to vote and the doors were locked, according to state law. People banged on the glass doors, demanding to be let in.

They waited outside and were allowed in after the judge issued a ruling to open the doors until 6:30 p.m. ET, allowing anyone in who was on the sidewalk and the landing just outside the bank of doors.

In New York, meanwhile, some people who voted in person Tuesday said they'd had trouble requesting and receiving absentee ballots.

A New York Democratic consultant told CNN that people at polling sites have reported voters saying they were there because their ballots never arrived in the mail.

The New York City Board of Elections tweeted Monday afternoon that some polling sites may be late to open Tuesday because the subway system would be closed from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. for cleaning, which could result in some poll workers arriving late. Reports emerged on social media of some voters having to wait Tuesday as their polling places opened late.

In Kentucky, Democratic voters were deciding a closely watched Senate primary between McGrath, a former fighter pilot who is backed by the national party establishment, and Booker, a Black state lawmaker who has emerged as a national voice in recent weeks during protests over police brutality and racial injustice. The winner will take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the fall.

In New York, several competitive House primaries were at stake -- including progressive Jamaal Bowman's bid to unseat longtime Democratic Rep. Eliot Engel.

Kentucky's consolidation from 3,700 polling places to less than 200, including just one in the state's two largest cities, led to concerns of a suppressed Black vote, including from national figures such as Hillary Clinton, NBA star LeBron James and Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate.

Booker has also been a vocal critic of the state's limited in-person voting options. His campaign organized free Lyft rides to the polls.

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and Republican secretary of state Adams have repeatedly pointed out that the state allowed everyone to vote by mail after it delayed its March primary due to the coronavirus pandemic.

"They misrepresented what a Democratic governor and I put into place," Adams told CNN of the concerns and criticism.

"We spent several weeks negotiating. I got some things I wanted; he got some things he wanted. It was a good outcome for voters of both parties and Republicans and Democrats both have responded positively to the more options to vote," he said.

In New York, absentee voting was a particularly critical option available to voters in this primary election because of the pandemic. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order allowing voters to request absentee ballots by citing a "temporary illness" if they feared contracting coronavirus at a polling site.

It appears that many New Yorkers chose to take advantage of that -- according to data provided by the New York State Board of Elections, they have mailed 2 million ballots. There were just 115,000 absentee voters in New York during the 2016 presidential primary.

Results in both states will likely be delayed due to an increase in mail-in voting.

This story has been updated with additional developments from Election Day.