Ballot scanners weren’t working at polling sites across New York’s Westchester County on Tuesday, county election officials said. Instead of feeding ballots into the machines, voters are being told to put them in designated ballot bags and told they will still be counted.
“Voters should continue to complete their paper ballots as instructed by poll workers,” the Westchester County Board of Elections said in a statement. “Ballots will be placed in designated orange emergency ballot bags, which will remain secured and monitored. These ballots will subsequently be counted in accordance with applicable election procedures.”
The New York State Board of Elections later verified on X that “the affected scanners rejected ballots they could not properly recognize rather than incorrectly tabulating them. Every valid vote will be counted ... Accuracy will never be sacrificed for speed.”
The board has not said when the bagged ballots will be counted, and did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment as of publication. Whether that affects tonight’s results will largely depend on how close the races are. The county’s votes include two House seats, one in the 16th District and the 17th District.
“Every ballot will be counted,” Rep. Mike Lawler, a Republican campaigning for reelection in the 17th District, said. Cait Conley, Lawler’s Democratic opponent, wrote online, “Don’t be dissuaded and have your voice heard.” The county encouraged voters to stay in line.
State Attorney General Letitia James, who is up for reelection, posted on X that her office was monitoring the issue and emphasized that “your votes will count.”
What happened in Westchester County?
The Board of Elections’ initial statement on the situation said the problem came from the thickness of the paper ballots. It later clarified the statement to say it is “an issue involving paper ballots,” but did not specify ballot thickness. The board did not publicly say why the wording was changed.
Pamela Smith, the CEO and president of Verified Voting, told HuffPost that ballot paper thickness impacting the scanners is not a new issue. While she does not know exactly why the board changed its wording, she said that officials may want to investigate fully before naming the cause.
“You might have different batches of paper [to print the ballots], and the thickness of the paper can sometimes be problematic for a particular scanner,” Smith said. Ballots used at polling places on Election Day may have been printed at a different time and on a different paper than those used for early voting, she said. Storage conditions can also make a small difference.
“When you go to a polling place, you’re using ballots that were printed at a different time on a different stock,” she said. “Sometimes it’ll show up in pre-election testing; it depends on when the batch is created. There are a lot of variables that can happen.”
Smith also said that she had been told by a colleague that the scanners’ programming was changed after it was first set up, to address a contest in one unnamed municipality in Westchester. According to Smith, the updated programming was tested and used on early voting and Election Day machines in that municipality, while the rest of the county continued using original programming. It is not clear whether this is connected to the scanner failures. The board has not publicly addressed the claim, and HuffPost could not independently confirm it.
No matter what, votes will count.
Poll workers are trained for situations like this, Smith said. If a scanner is causing problems, they are instructed to immediately and safely store completed ballots in designated containers, in this case the orange bags, and bring them to the county office to be scanned on a larger machine. Poll workers do not want to stop people from voting or create long lines by making voters wait for the scanners to work.
“Usually the county office will have a larger scanner that is a little more tolerant of different paper weights,” Smith said. “They can scan them there, and then they’re included in the count.”
Smith said it is extremely unlikely the votes for these two Westchester County districts will be counted by hand. Instead, she expects the ballots will be scanned at the county office tonight after polls close. This does not “dramatically” delay the final results, Smith said, because the ballot scanning is the quickest part of voting.
The Washington Sun reported workers may have to count by hand until the issue is resolved; the board did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment by publication time.
“It might not be counted in the moment, but it will be counted,” Smith said.