New Jersey has now extended its voting deadline for those submitting ballots via e-mail and fax to 8 pm Eastern on Friday. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, state officials allowed those displaced to request a ballot by fax or e-mail and then submit back the same way. However, voters had to request their e-mailed or faxed ballot by 5 pm Eastern on Tuesday, a deadline that has just now passed.

State media reported that Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno announced the extension for ballot submissions on Tuesday afternoon. County officials now are required to process the ballot requests by 12 pm local time on Friday, and voters must submit their completed ballots by 8 pm.

"Today's been a crazy day," Robert Pantina, County Clerk John Hogan's chief of staff, told NJ.com. "With the electronic application requests, it's been well over a thousand."

As we reported earlier today, the official address to request a ballot in Bergen County, the state’s largest, just outside New York City, was overloaded. As a backup, New Jersey officials told residents to use cj_durkin@hotmail.com, the county clerks’ personal email address. Not surprisingly, many computer science experts (and us here at Ars) are a bit surprised that officials would accept notoriously insecure e-mail as a valid means of submitting ballots—even given Sandy’s destructive consequences.

Still, Gov. Chris Christie had stern words for his state’s electorate: "If you haven’t been displaced by the storm, get your butt up and go vote at your polling place," he told The Record. "This is not a convenience thing."