Westchester County Changes Reason for Voting Machine Failure on Election Day

When voting machines were shut down throughout Westchester County Tuesday as citizens tried to cast their ballots to decide a hotly-contested New York House race, the Board of Elections provided an explanation for the problem, then removed it for a time, then claimed another issue was to blame.

“BREAKING: Voting machine problems across Westchester County on Election Day!” local NBC affiliate WNBC-TV Managing Editor Steven Bogner reported Tuesday morning in a social media post in the eight o’clock hour, in which he describes the county’s explanation:

“The culprit: paper ballots that are too thick for the machines to accept. The Board of Elections says ballots will be secure and every vote will be counted.”

A screenshot of the initial statement shows that the county elections board did, indeed, claim that the ballots given to voters were too thick for the voting machines:

“The Westchester County Board of Elections (BOE) is aware of an issue involving the thickness of paper ballots that is preventing voting machines from accepting ballots at polling locations throughout the County.”

X.com screenshot

After more than an hour of social media mocking and media coverage of the ballot-thickness explanation, the Westchester Board of Elections then posted a “correction,” deleting “the thickness of” from its statement, Bogner reported, again providing a screenshot.

“UPDATE on Westchester County voting ... the plot thickens ... or should I say thins out ... Board of Elections removes "thickness" from its previous statement and now says it ‘is aware of an issue involving paper ballots that is preventing voting machines from accepting ballots’”

Bloomberg also reported the change – noting that it reached out, but no explanation was provided for the deletion of the county election board’s explanation:

“An earlier statement from the Westchester County Board of Elections had said there was a problem with the thickness of the paper ballots, though that explanation was removed in a subsequent update from the officials. The board didn’t elaborate on the reason for the change in wording and didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.”

Then, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, the New York State Board of Elections released a statement providing its own version of the reason why the voting process failed - blaming “an update to the county’s election programming that occurred after the initial preparation and testing of Election Day voting equipment.”

Thus, according to the latest incarnation of the explanation, incompetent programming of the voting machines, not the thickness of the ballots, caused the voting machines to be shut down.