Past 11:30 p.m. on Tuesday night, a strange moment arrived for obsessive D.C. election-watchers: The D.C. Board of Elections results page suddenly stopped its live results tally, with only 142 of 143 precincts reporting. One precinct—precinct 110—wasn’t counted yet, and remained uncounted through the night.
In the night’s strong showing for incumbents, the results of one precinct could not have made a difference in any outcomes. But still—what happened to precinct 110?
It turns out there was some trouble getting the vote tallies to the Board of Elections on Tuesday, according to BOE spokesperson Rachel Coll. For some reason, Election Day workers at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church in Ward 7 (precinct 110’s polling place) did not electronically send the results to BOE after polling was closed, as they were supposed to.
“I don’t know why—it just didn’t happen,” says Coll. “Some of the precincts [sent the results] much later because they had long lines until like 10:30, so we weren’t sure if it was because they had a long line, or if it was a non-sending of results. By the time we realized it was a non-sending of results, the church was locked and we couldn’t get inside,” she says.
BOE couldn’t get into the church until this morning, when they were finally able to get to the voting machine and take the physical USB drive with the vote tally out of the machine. The board updated election results to show the votes in the 110th precinct shortly after 11 this morning. As expected, they didn’t change any results—but they did boost Attorney General Karl Racine’s lead in total votes across the District by around 3,000 votes (to a total of 196,766).
Coll says there is no reason to believe the votes were unsafe in the church where the machine was locked overnight. “By virtue of it being so secure, we couldn’t get inside until this morning,” she says. Coll declined to speculate about why election workers did not electronically send over the results Tuesday night, and says there’s no investigation pending into the matter.
“We have them. There is no reason to believe they were compromised or anything like that,” she says.
Natalie Delgadillo