\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Across the county, the voting machines that processed the marked ballots were not working.<\/p>\n
It would be hard to imagine a worse location for a countywide voting problem in New York than Westchester, where one of the country\u2019s most contested House races was taking place between the Republican incumbent, Mike Lawler, and the Democratic challenger, Cait Conley.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Conspiracy theories quickly abounded, especially in President Trump\u2019s circle. But Mr. Lawler, a Trump ally, cautioned against spreading false theories.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to be clear, there are no shenanigans going on here, there are no intentional issues going on here,\u201d Mr. Lawler said at a news conference on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Instead, what appears to be at issue is an unfortunate bureaucratic snafu.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The county noticed the error in time to correct the digital \u201cballot definition file,\u201d 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 except in Ardsley.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe local folks say that it is the printer\u2019s issue,\u201d Mr. Jenkins said. \u201cCertainly 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Westchester County Board of Elections did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n
Both accounts do agree on at least one thing: Tuesday\u2019s voting problems are a product of human error, and every Westchester County resident will ultimately have their ballot tallied.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery valid vote will be counted, and the established canvass, recanvass, and post-election audit procedures will remain in place,\u201d said the state Board of Elections, in a statement. \u201cAccuracy will never be sacrificed for speed.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
County election officials are now ensuring there are properly coded scanners at the roughly 400 polling sites across the county, the person said.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 under bipartisan supervision \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
During his Tuesday news conference, Mr. Lawler said ballots would be processed once the scanners are set up. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s going to take a few hours,\u201d he said. \u201cWe expect to have results certainly into the wee hours of tomorrow morning.\u201d<\/p>\n
The impact of this ballot-counting snafu is largely in the narrative-setting realm.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cElection officials plan for things to go wrong, and that ultimately the cause of what went wrong doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d said Derek Tisler, a lawyer with the Brennan Center for Justice. \u201cThey are trained that if the scanner is not working, if it\u2019s not accepting ballots, it doesn\u2019t matter why that\u2019s happening, you go to Plan B.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Tisler compared the process of machines counting votes to the machines that read Scantron tests in schools \u2014 marks corresponding with certain answers are interpreted by the machines\u2019 programs and counted. The machines themselves don\u2019t read the ballots, just the marks, and translate them accordingly.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDemocrats are already trying to steal the election in New York today,\u201d she wrote. \u201cWhat are the odds the ballot machines in Westchester County aren\u2019t working? Democrats only know how to cheat.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Lawler appeared on CNN to directly rebut Ms. Loomer\u2019s claim and to vow, \u201cEvery single ballot is going to be counted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Tisler pointed out that an extensive investigation will take place following the election to determine exactly what went wrong.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
On election night that year, unofficial results initially showed Mr. Biden beating Mr. Trump before local officials noticed an error and fixed it. <\/span>Mr. Trump eventually beat Mr. Biden by roughly 2,500 votes.<\/p>\n The problem was determined to have stemmed from human error \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cImportantly, the affected scanners rejected ballots they could not properly recognize rather than incorrectly tabulating them,\u201d the state Board of Elections said.<\/p>\n Grace Ashford, Wesley Parnell and Andrea Barnes contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52570,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[2717,4579,97,12424,3580,132,17979,13258,127,2980],"class_list":{"0":"post-52569","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-closing","9":"tag-congress","10":"tag-control","11":"tag-decide","12":"tag-elections","13":"tag-live","14":"tag-midterm","15":"tag-polls","16":"tag-updates","17":"tag-voters"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52569\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}