In a broad swath of suburbs just north of New York City, voters in Westchester County turned up at their polling sites on Election Day to confront an unsettling sight.
Across the county, the voting machines that processed the marked ballots were not working.
It would be hard to imagine a worse location for a countywide voting problem in New York than Westchester, where one of the country’s most contested House races was taking place between the Republican incumbent, Mike Lawler, and the Democratic challenger, Cait Conley.
By late afternoon on Tuesday, the situation still had not been resolved, with poll workers depositing filled-out ballots in orange emergency ballot containers for eventual processing. How and when that would occur was still being worked out, but it seemed likely that the results in the congressional race would be delayed.
Conspiracy theories quickly abounded, especially in President Trump’s circle. But Mr. Lawler, a Trump ally, cautioned against spreading false theories.
“I want to be clear, there are no shenanigans going on here, there are no intentional issues going on here,” Mr. Lawler said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Instead, what appears to be at issue is an unfortunate bureaucratic snafu.
So what happened?
At some point in recent weeks, as New Yorkers across the state were receiving their mail-in ballots, the Westchester County Board of Elections was made aware of a problem. A town justice race in the Village of Ardsley, population 5,000, had been omitted.
The county noticed the error in time to correct the digital “ballot definition file,” which lists the races and candidates in the election, according to the state Board of Elections. And the county updated the ballot reading software to account for the new ballot format — but only in Ardsley. The software was not adequately updated in the rest of the county to account for the new ballot file, the state said.
For Election Day, many counties, including Westchester, get their ballots printed ahead of time, and the ballots were printed with the corrected information, according to the state. But the machines in Westchester were still programmed to read the old file — except in Ardsley.
Ken Jenkins, the Westchester County executive, offered a slightly different narrative. In his telling, it was the printer who was at fault, rather than the county.
“The local folks say that it is the printer’s issue,” Mr. Jenkins said. “Certainly the state is correct that the machines could have been reprogrammed for the updated ballot; however, the printer, according to the Board of Elections, used the wrong file.”
The Westchester County Board of Elections did not respond to requests for comment.
Both accounts do agree on at least one thing: Tuesday’s voting problems are a product of human error, and every Westchester County resident will ultimately have their ballot tallied.
“Every valid vote will be counted, and the established canvass, recanvass, and post-election audit procedures will remain in place,” said the state Board of Elections, in a statement. “Accuracy will never be sacrificed for speed.”
As of about 1 p.m. about 22,000 ballots across Westchester County had been submitted but not processed at polling sites, according to a person familiar with the matter.
County election officials are now ensuring there are properly coded scanners at the roughly 400 polling sites across the county, the person said.
What happens next?
While election officials race to reprogram their machines, voters casting ballots in Westchester are having those ballots placed in the orange containers. Those containers, in turn, will be kept in bipartisan custody until such time as their contents can be fed — under bipartisan supervision — into the ballot scanners, according to the state. The hope is that those scanners will again be functional by the time polls close at 9 p.m.
During his Tuesday news conference, Mr. Lawler said ballots would be processed once the scanners are set up.
“It’s going to take a few hours,” he said. “We expect to have results certainly into the wee hours of tomorrow morning.”
Why does this matter?
The impact of this ballot-counting snafu is largely in the narrative-setting realm.
Because of the software issue, the initial vote may tilt toward Mr. Lawler, who lost Westchester County in 2024. But by the time all the votes are counted, the result will be the same as if the problem had never occurred.
“Election officials plan for things to go wrong, and that ultimately the cause of what went wrong doesn’t matter,” said Derek Tisler, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice. “They are trained that if the scanner is not working, if it’s not accepting ballots, it doesn’t matter why that’s happening, you go to Plan B.”
Mr. Tisler compared the process of machines counting votes to the machines that read Scantron tests in schools — marks corresponding with certain answers are interpreted by the machines’ programs and counted. The machines themselves don’t read the ballots, just the marks, and translate them accordingly.
A full investigation would still need to take place after Election Day for officials to fully understand what exactly went wrong, Mr. Tisler said. But when it came to election results, the issue at hand was immaterial, since local officials quickly pivoted to backup measures.
Charges of vote-fixing conspiracy
Almost as soon as the first reports surfaced of issues in Westchester County, prominent political voices took to social media to spin the situation into a conspiracy.
Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator who frequently posts conspiracy theories on social media, suggested on X on Tuesday morning that the situation in Westchester was bigger than just a glitch in the voting machine software.
“Democrats are already trying to steal the election in New York today,” she wrote. “What are the odds the ballot machines in Westchester County aren’t working? Democrats only know how to cheat.”
Mr. Lawler appeared on CNN to directly rebut Ms. Loomer’s claim and to vow, “Every single ballot is going to be counted.”
Is there any precedent for this?
Mr. Tisler pointed out that an extensive investigation will take place following the election to determine exactly what went wrong.
But if the issue in Westchester is determined to be human error relating to the calibration of voting machine technology, a similar situation occurred in Antrim County, Mich., on Nov. 3, 2020 when Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Donald J. Trump faced off in the general election.
On election night that year, unofficial results initially showed Mr. Biden beating Mr. Trump before local officials noticed an error and fixed it. Mr. Trump eventually beat Mr. Biden by roughly 2,500 votes.
The problem was determined to have stemmed from human error — an election worker configured ballot scanners and reporting systems with slightly different versions of the ballot, which meant some results did not correlate with the correct candidate when ballots were loaded into machines.
The crucial difference was that in Westchester County, when the machines struggled to read the ballots, they simply spit them back out instead of tallying the vote incorrectly.
“Importantly, the affected scanners rejected ballots they could not properly recognize rather than incorrectly tabulating them,” the state Board of Elections said.
Grace Ashford, Wesley Parnell and Andrea Barnes contributed reporting.
