Election complaint webpage sees post-Super Tuesday spike

A Justice Department website where voters can fill out election complaints received a temporary surge in traffic Wednesday morning — one day after states held their presidential primaries on Super Tuesday. 

{mosads}The webpage  briefly broke into a list of most-visited government sites around 9 a.m. It peaked with more than 500 visitors, according to a government site set up to track visits to government addresses. 

At one point, it was the 11th-most popular government website, trailing far behind the most popular pages like the Internal Revenue Service, the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake report page. 

The number of visits to the page do not predict how many complaints, if any, were actually filed. By 10 a.m., some 100 people were still on the page. 

It is not entirely clear what led to the spike, but there was scattered social media chatter referencing news reports that Bill Clinton shook hands with voters inside a Boston polling station. 

Massachusetts’s secretary of the commonwealth’s office told CNN that shaking hands isn’t a violation, adding that it reached out to Hillary Clinton’s campaign to remind workers that explicit campaigning within 150 feet of a polling place is prohibited. 

A link to the Justice Department’s web page was posted on some Reddit pages supportive of Hillary Clinton’s rival, Bernie Sanders, and a Change.org petition started Wednesday morning that claimed Bill Clinton violated campaign laws had more than 30,000 supporters.

Hillary Clinton narrowly defeated Sanders in Massachusetts, with 50 percent of the vote, on her way to winning a majority of the Super Tuesday states.