A software glitch that led to incorrectly displayed voting tallies on the Summit County Board of Elections’ website on Election Night left Deputy Director Pete Zeigler visibly frustrated.
In one section, results showed that 100% of precincts had been reported when, in fact, many votes were still outstanding.
“There are a whole lot of people out there [in the community] that care about what these results have to say,” Zeigler said just after 11 p.m. Election Day. About 15 people worked behind the scenes to make sure votes were counted and reported before they went home.
“I can’t even count how many, I just know how many are bothering me,” Zeigler said that evening. “People want their results. I don’t blame them, and that’s why we’re still here. We’re doing everything we can to make sure people get their results and they’ll be out shortly, but I’d have much rather they be out by now.”
Ultimately, there were no issues in counting votes — it was just a glitch in the software the board uses to report timely figures to the public on its website. The BOE contracts with a company called Tenex Software Solutions. The board fed the Tenex software tallies as they came in so it would display up-to-date information on the BOE website, but the display incorrectly said all precincts were reported before the results were actually in.
When the board workers realized this and couldn’t fix it on their own, they stopped using the software and instead periodically uploaded static PDF files.
“It failed us last night,” said Summit County Board of Elections Chairman Bill Rich on Wednesday. “We have to talk with Tenex to find out what went wrong and figure out if we can continue to use them in the future.”
Signal Akron contacted Tenex for comment about the glitch on Wednesday afternoon but had not gotten a response by Thursday afternoon.
Two-page ballots create more data to download, slow the process
Voting results were also reported later than normal Tuesday night, Rich said, because the ballots consisted of two double-sided pages that took longer for the ballot scanners in the polling locations to tally and report, compared to single-page ballots.
The ballots were two pages on Tuesday because of the amount of text included for Ohio Issues 1 and 2. The new scanners, first used in Summit County in the May primary and again in the August special election, saved four PDF files per voter. The previous tabulators did not create images of ballots.
“We get USB memory sticks for each machine, we plug each one into the tabulating system and upload all the data, and that takes longer because there’s considerably more data than there used to be,” Rich said. “Between dealing with the problem we had with the Tenex reporting system and just the fact that it takes longer for our tabulating system to read the data from the USB sticks, the results were being posted later than usual.”
The two-page ballot also caused an issue for at least one voter in Ellet, who fed both pages into the scanner at the same time. A poll worker, who would normally guide the voter through the scanning process, was helping someone else at the time and the voter attempted to “self serve.”
Rich said that if someone scanned both pages at the same time, the votes on the pages facing each other would not be tallied.
In the May primary and August special election, the board printed the ballot on thick paper stock. Many voters found it difficult to feed the ballots into the new scanners.
Finding a balance
The Summit County BOE is still determining the right balance between the thickness of the ballot paper and the size of the scanner opening so problems like that don’t occur. For Tuesday, the board decided on thinner paper to make it easier to push the ballots into the scanner. But that meant the ballots were so thin that two pages could be inserted at the same time.
“We may need to see if we can narrow the gap on the machines a little so that it will only accept one ballot at a time,” Rich said. “The key is going to be if we can narrow it enough so that it will only accept one at a time, but not so much that it will make it too difficult to insert a single sheet. Is there a happy medium somewhere? We’re going to have to try to figure it out.”
