Voting tabulation error could flip New Jersey school board race

Steph Whiteside

2 years ago

Poll worker Jayantha Fernando organizes documents at a polling site in Hackensack, N.J., Tuesday, July 7, 2020. Voters have until 8 p.m. to have their ballot postmarked or dropped at one of at least five boxes per county. Half of the polling places in each county must also stay open for voters to cast a ballot in person, though that means they must use a provisional ballot that will be counted once officials determine one has not been mailed to county election officials already. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

(NewsNation) — A local school board race in New Jersey could flip after a voting tabulation error, officials discovered in a post-election audit.

The error only affected one race, a non-partisan school board election in Ocean Township, New Jersey. A technician uploading vote data from a USB drive accidentally uploaded the data twice.

Software on the vote tabulation system, run by Election Systems and Software, should have flagged the duplicated results. An spokesperson for the company said Monmouth County had been investigating reports of slow performance prior to the election.

While attempting to fix the issue, technicians uninstalled and reinstalled voting software and an error was made that disabled the fail-safe mechanism and allowed the USB to be uploaded twice.

The company said it would work with the county to reinstall the software correctly and that the error was discovered due to a series of checks and balances designed to reveal any irregularities.

The error was limited to Monmouth County but officials believe the school board race is the only one close enough for the outcome to be affected.

The New Jersey attorney general’s office has ordered the county to recanvas and recertify all election results.