The Independent View: NY, Niagara County’s Election Results Were Late After New Process

A new election night reporting system was put into effect by the Niagara County Board of Elections on Tuesday, along with a new website design.

It was supposed to provide faster and more accurate returns, but instead, the new system produced the slowest returns seen in the county since its election system entered the computer age 25 years ago.

Niagara County, normally one of the fastest-reporting counties in the region, posted no returns at all until almost 11 p.m. Tuesday, and the board count wasn’t completed until nearly 1 a.m., irking candidates and the media alike.

There were tests before the general election, and all went well But under real-world election night conditions, the system crashed.

The new process was to begin with one of the election inspectors at the site removing the memory card from the ballot scanner after the polls closed. The card was to be placed in a leather envelope and taken by the inspector to the town or city hall to be given to the municipal clerk.

The county had installed a memory card reader at each clerk’s office and programmed an existing town or city computer to support their ballot format. The clerk was to insert a memory card into the reader and watch for a green bar on the screen that showed the card had been read.

The electronic transmission was to go to a private county website via FTP, or file transfer protocol. A Board of Elections worker, using a “verify and publish” function, would confirm that the transmission had been received and click to post the number on the public website.

This process of getting to the clerks worked fine. But the clerks found that they couldn’t get the private website to accept the card readers’ output.

Testing was done one municipality at a time. On Election Night, with 12 towns and three cities trying to transmit results simultaneously, the website crashed. The FTP site was not set up to handle the simultaneous transmissions volume.

The time needed to put a backup plan into operation and have each town or city drive the memory cards to a central election office caused further delay, meaning that at a time when Niagara County returns were usually complete, they were just starting to appear online. The new website did not contain settings for precinct-by-precinct results.

In another unusual election situation, dozens of people jammed the counter area at the Board of Elections late in the afternoon of Election Day. State Supreme Court Justice Richard C. Kloch Sr. issued 80 court orders allowing voters not on the registration polls to cast ballots. The voters had been dropped from the rolls because they hadn’t voted recently or had moved without re-registering. Niagara County Judge Matthew J. Murphy III and Family Court Judge John F. Batt issued about 30 similar orders in the week before the election. But a court order means the voter can vote on the machine, no questions asked. However, voters had to drive to the central location and appear at the election office to obtain the judge’s order, then drive back to their polling place and vote on the machine.