Software glitch delays results in Carbon

A software glitch in tallying the votes caused Carbon County election officials to need to turn to the ballot tapes that the new machines record to finalize the unofficial results in Tuesday’s general election.

On Wednesday morning, Commissioner William O’Gurek, a member of the county election board, said that a programming issue led to the problem.

“Unfortunately, we experienced a snag in our calculation of the votes by districts at the election office after the polls closed,” he said. “The difficulty was caused by a programming situation in which some of the totals of the districts did not properly load to the cumulative total of some of the municipalities and school districts.”

O’Gurek said that the glitch caused a significant delay in the final calculations, but it did not cause any of the races to be called for the wrong candidates.

County election officials contacted Dominion Voting System, the company that made the machines, and worked through the issue using the ballot tapes from each voting precinct and reloading those from start to finish.

“While this was a cumbersome task that lasted through the night and did not end until around 5 o’clock this morning, we are confident and assure the public that we now have the absolute accurate totals for each of the candidates,” O’Gurek said.

New unofficial results were submitted to the media just before 7 a.m.

This is the first election that Carbon County has used the new voting machines, which return to the paper ballot system. The new machines were required by Gov. Tom Wolf following the last presidential election as a way to have a paper trail in the event something goes wrong.

Carbon County ordered the new equipment a few months ago and received it last month.