By Stephen Appezzato
The state cleared up confusion about last year’s general election in a recent report, noting a software error was to blame for incorrect vote counts. The report discloses why in four Monmouth County municipalities, some votes were counted twice.
The state Attorney General’s Office ordered the independent investigation in January after reports of alleged issues with vote tabulations. A recount of the election results in February confirmed discrepancies in vote tallies for elections in Fair Haven, Tinton Falls, Belmar and Ocean Township.
In Ocean Township, board of education candidate Steve Clayton initially won his seat by 20 votes. The recount unseated Clayton, showing Jeff Weinstein won by a single vote. In the other three municipalities, the recount resulted in different official vote tallies but no change in the victor.
According to the report, Election Systems & Soft-ware (ES&S) was responsible for the errors, failing to re-upload an important software patch after working on the system.
In July 2022 the Monmouth County Board of Elections requested ES&S fix a network speed issue within the system. The company dispatched a customer relations manager to the scene, who was tasked with uninstalling and reinstalling the election soft- ware resolve the problem. According to the probe, the employee “had no software or hardware technical expertise.”
During the diagnostic, the ES&S worker was given maintenance instructions over the phone by another company employee who omitted an important step – reinstalling a software patch that would prevent ballot duplication.
Poll workers collected election counts on flash drives and uploaded them to a central server. In the event a poll worker accidentally uploaded the same flash drive data twice, the software patch would have prevented the vote duplications.
But, as the patch was not reinstalled with the rest of the software, the process was vulnerable to human error.
The investigation, which was led by former Attorney General Peter Harvey, reported “no evidence suggesting that the miscount was the result of any fraudulent or willfully wrongful conduct by any Monmouth County election official or personnel, ES&S employee, or any other person,” putting fears of election fraud and tampering to rest.
Monmouth County Commissioner Director Thomas Arnone described the probe’s findings as “more troubling than we were originally advised about.” The probe confirmed that “the primary reason for the error was ES&S’s failure to implement a software patch designed to prevent the tabulation of ballots more than once and it failed to do so, even after ES&S assured the County that the system was prepared ahead of the 2022 General Election,” Arnone said.
Going forward, Harvey recommended that election vendors only use fully trained employees when conducting maintenance. Further training for poll workers and a more comprehensive communication plan from the county were also recommended, among other points, to keep the public and election officials promptly informed of any voting issues.
County Superintendent of Elections Christopher Siciliano implored the state “to devise more comprehensive L and A (logic and accuracy) testing, as recommended in Mr. Harvey’s report.”
Monmouth County Clerk Christine Hanlon said the county was glad the report was completed and confirmed their previous statement about “ES&S’s failure to properly install their proprietary software in our election systems.”
The article originally appeared in the September 14 – 20, 2023 print edition of The Two River Times.
