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
