Shortly after 6 AM on Election Day, Westchester County Executive Ken Jenkins received a text. Someone was having trouble voting. Across the entire county, voter machines were having trouble processing paper ballots. By midday, he held a press conference at the Michaelian Office Building in White Plains, with the latest developments dispelling rumors and assuring citizens their votes would be counted.
"You're furious, and I am as well," he said. "Westchester County Voters deserve a fair, secure, seamless process. Today has fallen short of that standard... We are working through this problem feverishly."
The malfunction follows a 10-day early voting period that occurred without any problems.
In his initial explanation, Jenkins cited printed paper ballots that were not being properly read by the scanners due to an issue with the barcodes.
But in a press release, the Board of Elections stated that "the issue affecting voting machines throughout Westchester County today resulted from an update to the county's election programming that occurred after the initial preparation and testing of Election Day voting equipment. A change affecting a contest in one municipality required updated election programming, which was subsequently tested and deployed for early voting and for Election Day machines in that municipality. However, Election Day machines elsewhere in the county continued to use the original programming and therefore could not recognize and accept the ballots being used for Election Day."
Jenkins said a bipartisan investigation was in the future.
With the issue identified, work was already underway on the logistics. The county's 45 municipalities contain over 2,000 voter districts, divided between 332 voting locations, with more than 900 voter machines between them, Jenkins explained. Updating the software for each machine wasn't an option during active voting.
Tarrytown was the first to have a scanner back up and running, using a ballot machine designed for voters in need of accessibility. The ADA-compliant voting machines have two components: a ballot marking device and a scanner attachment, and each polling place has one. The scanner processed ballots once "turned up". "That'll continue on in these voting locations where at least one of the scanners is going to be turned up. We called them the 'Plan B' scanners.
Although Federal ADA policies are currently being dismantled by the Trump administration, in Westchester it may be what keeps elections running relatively on schedule.
Jenkins hoped that by the time the after-work rush arrived, polls in the southern end of the county would also have their one scanner fixed.
"Voting continues through established emergency ballot procedures," the press release stated. "Completed ballots are securely maintained under bipartisan oversight and will be scanned and counted in accordance with established procedures."
"The message is that people are going to be able to vote, make their voice heard, and the counting will resume as soon as normal when we get through the machine issues," Jenkins concluded.
After 120,000 early votes were cast, Jenkins cited the Board of Elections' estimate that about 57,000 emergency ballots were cast by emergency mid-day, for a total of approximately 250,000 ballots that will need to be scanned tonight. Ballots cast at locations with reprogrammed scanners will have their votes tallied right away.
Still to be determined is whether ballots will be transported to a central location for counting, or if the counting will be done on location. That decision is made by the Board of Elections.
Westchester is a politically important county to the state's politics. In 2022, Politico called the county a "firewall" because it remained blue while the rest of the suburbs in the state went red. So any discrepancies in this county could have a significant impact on election outcomes.
