They tried. And tried. And tried. And tried and tried again.
But try as they might, Monroe County Board of Elections officials could not replicate the snafu that led to unprecedented delays in reporting the results of local races last fall.
That was the upshot of a board investigation into why officials were unable to upload election returns onto their website on Election Day in a timely manner.
Board commissioners, Lisa Nicolay, the Republican, and Jackie Ortiz, the Democrat, released the findings Tuesday in a joint statement.
Ultimately, they concluded, the board’s reporting system was functioning properly on Election Day and the delay was attributable to what they called “transient network issues” that were not present during subsequent tests during the board’s investigation.
“We were hoping obviously to find a definitive thing that we could correct and fix and move on and say that it wouldn’t happen again,” Nicolay said in an interview. “But unfortunately, like most things in technology, it could have been one more thing.”
Nicolay said the board’s best guess as to what happened was that administrators of Monroe County’s network may have temporarily modified a setting that reduced the board’s bandwidth for loading information onto the web.
The Board of Elections typically posts results online within an hour of polls closing, and that’s what commissioners said the public can expect this year.
On Nov. 8, 2022, however, the board was unable to report any results until well after midnight — a delay that sowed confusion and speculation about election integrity.
Commissioners took pains at a news conference the next morning to assure the public that the accuracy of the results was not in question and blamed the delay on “connectivity issues” with the board website. They pledged then to investigate.
Longer wait times for results in 2020 contributed to false claims that the election had been stolen from President Donald Trump. In reality, the delays were caused by counting an unprecedented volume of mail ballots and tight races in some states.
Last year, an abundance of early and absentee votes was again at play. Board commissioners acknowledged that those votes can slow the reporting process but said that did not cause the delay in uploading election returns to the website last fall.
During their probe, election officials re-ran their election night reporting process top to bottom five times over two months, anticipating that they would at some point be tripped up the way they were on Election Day.
Each time they repeated the process, though, their run proceeded without delay, according to the commissioners.
“It was not possible to replicate the errors encountered on Election Day 2022,” the commissioners reported.
Despite not pinpointing an ongoing issue that would delay reporting results in the future, the commissioners said they would modify their process in two ways.
First, the board will relocate its Election Day operations from its downtown offices in Rochester to its service center in Brighton, where it maintains a server that is isolated from other county network infrastructure.
Secondly, the board will pre-load early and absentee voting results so that processing them will not slow down the reporting of votes cast at polling stations.
“We are confident that the remedies now in place for the 2023 primary and general elections will result in election night reporting that is not only accurate but timely, as well,” read the commissioners’ report.
