Memory sticks holding vote results temporarily go missing in Nassau

A pilot program to get Nassau County election results online more quickly Tuesday night ran into problems as a handful of computer memory sticks bearing results were temporarily unaccounted for, according to county election officials Wednesday.

Under a new process, election data was uploaded from polling sites to the county Board of Elections to try to get an unofficial, updated count to the public more quickly than has been possible.

The high volume of data, however, overwhelmed the system, causing delays, officials said. To make matters worse, a handful of voting machine results had to be counted manually after midnight after 19 memory sticks, used to download the data, had been returned to BOE but were not in their proper pouches. That prompted a search, and all sticks were located in the predawn hours Wednesday.

“The BOE is in possession of everything,” Republican BOE Commissioner James Moriarty said.

BOE officials detailed the problems Wednesday.

Election machines in Nassau County record votes onto two memory sticks: one for regular vote counting and one for backup. With 1,012 voting machines used on Election Day, that produced 2,024 memory sticks. The machines also produce a paper receipt “tape” that records votes, and the cast ballots themselves get stored in locked containers, Democratic BOE Commissioner James Scheuerman said.

On election night, all those materials are physically delivered to the Nassau BOE building in Mineola by election inspectors and county police.

The materials are placed into color-coded bags at the polling site, and those get logged in by election officials as they come in.

In the past, the backup memory stick was only used if there was a problem, such as a corrupt file. This time, the backup stick was used to transmit data from the polling site after the polls closed.

“It was a demo process consistent with election law that was being done so that we can ensure that the public gets that information even quicker going forward,” Keith Corbett, Democratic counsel for the BOE, said.

Though the BOE had gone through test runs, on election night the system had trouble processing all the information coming in from the polling sites. And, using the backup memory stick caused some confusion when the materials were brought back to the BOE: In some cases, the backup stick had been removed from a machine, but not the regular stick — or a stick was put into the wrong bag.

For example, “instead of being put in there [the bag], they stayed in the machine,” Moriarty said. “The machine came back and the yellow bag came back, but the stick was in the machine, not the yellow bag.”

Finally, all the sticks were accounted for, Moriarty said. “It's just that instead of being in one bag, it's in the other bag, and everything gets accounted for,” he said.

Scheuerman said the new reporting system worked about 80% of the time, adding he, Moriarty and Board of Elections staff will review what happened.

The new system, “if it can't be fixed, then we're going to find another route or we're going to do our best to make sure that we do right for the voters of the county,” Scheuerman said.

While the unofficial account has been completed, the official count can take several weeks to be certified.