Double Error by ES&S Disrupted NorCo Election

A double error by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), Northampton County's election machine vendor, managed to completely disrupt yesterday's municipal election. 

The first mistake was a simple coding error by an ES&S employee. It completely screwed up the retention races for Superior Court President Judge Jack Panella and Judge Victor Stabile. Those who voted Yes were shown on the paper receipt as having voted done so, But those who voted Yes to Judge  Panella and No to Judge Stabile were shown as having voted No to Panella and Yes to Stabile.

The second mistake happened during something known as logic and accuracy (L&A)  testing. Before an election, every voting machine is placed through a series of tests to determine whether the votes cast on that machine are being tabulated accurately. The L&A testing failed to catch this coding or labelling error, likely because ES&S failed to try different combinations. 

Though the paper receipt showed that Yes votes for Panella were being counted as Nos, ES&S and county officials assured that the count would be correct on the USB drive that comes with every voting machine. 

This double error is two mistakes too many. At a news conference late yesterday afternoon (you can see it above), Executive Lamont McClure took the hit. "Ultimately, it is my responsibility," he acknowledged. He did downplay the problem as "relatively minor," but admitted these mistakes undermine public confidence in the integrity of our elections. 

They certainly do. Moreover, this double error in the appellate retention races managed to completely disrupt the entire election. 

ES&S provides the elections systems for over 30 Pennsylvania jurisdictions but only had this specific program in Northampton County. 

According to Administrator Charles Dertinger, the problem was brought to the attention of elections officials at about 7:15 am. They tested their own machine and confirmed it was a problem. At about 7:30 am, Dertinger states that elections officials notified all elections judges (every election judge is provided a county cell phone)to discontinue using the voting machines and instead issue emergency ballots to voters. If precincts ran out of emergency ballots, provisional ballots were used. At about 10 am, after a hearing before Judge Abe Kassis, elections judges were told they could return to using the machines because their vote on the screen will be the vote that ultimately is counted, regardless what the paper ballots show. Deringer said he would be "logistically impossible" to change the programming on all 365 machines in use in such a short time span.  

This "relatively minor" affecting only appellate court retention races had a negative impact on the entire election. Voting by machine was suspended at 7:30 am, forcing voters to use emergency and provisional ballots. That continued until after 10 am. 

The early morning hours are when a large segment of voters come in to vote on their way to work. Some voters in a hurry were told to come back later. How many did? How many people never bothered to sign in and simply turned around a left because of this "relatively minor" error?    

Moreover, a voter who sees that his vote in a race is not registering on the paper receipt has every right to complain and be distrustful of the entire process. This supposedly minor error undermine public confidence in the election. What happened certainly had at least a minor impact of election day turnout. Since most election day voters are Republican, I am sure they will argue that this "relatively minor" error affected candidates in close contested races.