For Immediate Release:

November 10, 2014

 

Elections reporting glitch resolved

County Clerk to test countywide reporting  

 

FREEHOLD, NJ – Monmouth County Clerk M. Claire French announced today that the computer problem that caused the delay in tabulating and posting the County’s unofficial election results on Election Night Nov. 4 has been determined. 

 

Monmouth County Information Technology staff and Dominion Voting System staff worked together last week and through the weekend to analyze and solve the problem by looking at both computer software and hardware issues.

 

On Thursday afternoon, they set-up the equipment required to replicate the pre and post-election work flow. Because all of the equipment used in the election is impounded for the 15 days following the election, the staff worked with back-up equipment to recreate the scenarios.

 

The issue regarding the tallying of results cartridges on Election Night was caused by the four laptops that were used to create the 916 results cartridges for the voting machines. The laptops did not have the previous operating system uninstalled.

 

In September, the County upgraded the elections computer operating system to the latest, federal and state certified version of Dominion’s proprietary software.  

 

“The most important issue is the integrity and accuracy of the ballot,” said French. “The ballots were counted: the tally was delayed but still accurate.”

 

To get the tally on Election Night, cartridges from each of the County’s 916 voting machines and the corresponding paper printouts were delivered to the County Election Offices in Freehold for reading.  If a cartridge could not be read electronically, a district’s vote tallies were entered manually from the paper printout.

 

The unofficial election results were posted to the County’s website at 6 a.m. on Nov. 5.

 

“I want to thank Dominion Systems, our election system’s contractor for working diligently to figure out exactly what caused this problem,” said French.

 

“Going forward, we will not have this problem again because we will be on Dominion’s most current operating system. said French. “Also, I will be inviting all 53 municipal clerks to participate in a full, countywide test of our election system.”

 

On Nov. 4, 152,981 votes were cast, representing 35.7% of the County’s 428,212 registered voters. 

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