February 13, 2008
So There Actually Was a Delay in D.C. Voting Results
Last night I was flipping through the cable news channels in order to live-blog the Potomac Primary results, and as you'll see if you follow that link and scroll down toward after the 9 p.m. mark, something was amiss with the District's election returns. More than an hour after the polls closed, there was zero data from any of D.C.'s 142 precincts available from any major news outlet. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer even mentioned on-air that D.C.'s results were coming in "very, very slowly."
At about 9:40 p.m., with still no District data being reported on TV or online, I called the DCBOEE, and was quickly given the entire unofficial raw vote tally as of 9:28 p.m. by a helpful media liaison who answered the phone. About ten minutes after I hung up with the elections board, all the cable channels and washingtonpost.com started reporting the same data I had been given. It wasn't clear to me at the time whether the breakdown in communication had been the fault of DCBOEE or the media, but the Washington Post has since reported that there was in fact a delay in reporting D.C.'s voting results on the part of the city.
Cartridges from precinct voting scanners, which contain the actual polling data, were apparently delayed in being delivered to the elections board for counting due to last night's ice storm. That's pretty lame. Is there really no way for the DCBOEE to get counting started without the cartridges being physically taken to a single location? Virginia and Maryland, suffering from the same weather conditions and being oh, both around ten times larger than the District of Columbia, seemed to be reporting their results without delay.
D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty told the Post: "There is always room for improvement. . . . We should have made them happen sooner. Absolutely." Considering how much Fenty was in the national spotlight last night thanks to his aggressive support for Sen. Obama, you would think making sure our city's election process doesn't appear to be functioning at such a low level would have been a bigger priority for his administration.
Photo by billadler
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of course, this is just a symptom of the 24-minute news cycle, don't you think? i mean, yeah, getting the results instantly would be nice, but by the time we all woke up, 90% of the precincts were certified, and we knew the results.
i think having the results after one overnight is reasonable.
I would be embarrassed for DC, but almost every election ends with some terrible stories of poorly run elections and election-counting from various states of all shapes and sizes that are both far more embarrassing and garner much more national attention (see Florida in 2000 or Washington state (and that wasn't the first time!) for just some examples).
So although this doesn't really put us in a great light, it also is minor enough that it barely even puts us in any public light at all.
I'd call an hour and a half delay no big deal (if you're not trying to live-blog the results). It's not like it was too close to call based on exit polling.
That's pretty lame. Is there really no way for the DCBOEE to get counting started without the cartridges being physically taken to a single location?
Why should there be? It's only 10 miles across. Occasionally there's going to be something that slightly delays getting the cartridges together, but there's a lot of things I'd prefer D.C. address before they tackle this non-issue.
There was a alight delay at my polling place, but only for potential voters. The doors to the polling place had no doorknobs!
Agreed, having to wait an hour and a half last night for any of the precincts to wait was torture. It must have been even worse was poor Wolf Blitzer, the hardest working man in journalism, having to say things about the DC primary without any results. Won't someone think of the poor voters who even 90 whole minutes after the polls closed still did not know the score. I think the DC city government needs to launch an investigation into why there was not a snow emergency plan as part of the election process. Only then will we ever be able to have an election or primary that happens with us having the piece of mind of knowing the full results before we even think about sending our children to bed.
These transporting ballot delays have taken place before. Though I thought with the optical scanners and touchscreens there was a way to transmit tallies over the phone lines. I would think headquarters would at least have initial results without delay...
I don't know where you voted, but we had paper ballots and #2 pencils at my district polling station.
The entire experience was humiliating for our so called District. I went to my poll at 7:15a.m. to vote, just to find the doors weren't even open yet. They weren't "ready". I came back at 6:45p.m. to find that they had long since run out of ballots, so everyone was stuck using the one touch screen machine, resulting in a line down the hall and out the door. How could they run out of ballots? They know how many people are registered, and as opposed to assuming a large portion won't show up, they should have enough ballots for every single registered voter. Absolutely ridiculous.
IMGoph summed it up.
24-hour news is a luxury. Just because they're on for 24 hours doesn't mean all happenings must be instantaneous. Jeez, what happened to our collective attention span?
doug: Those paper ballots are then scanned by the aforementioned optical scanners (rather than counted by hand). I won't make a guess as to your age, but if you're on the younger side you may have used scantrons for the SAT/ACT or tests in school. It's the same concept.
doug: Those paper ballots are then scanned by the aforementioned optical scanners (rather than counted by hand). I won't make a guess as to your age, but if you're on the younger side you may have used scantrons for the SAT/ACT or tests in school. It's the same concept.
Again with the double posting! What's up with the site generating a posting error when the comment went through the first time? These false positives are, in my experience, all too common.
I don't think I've ever lost a comment when I've received the error message. Just ignore them.