ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Elections board officials down the Thruway in Rochester and out on Long Island are now trying to explain Tuesday night's issues and delays in reporting results of balloting there.
2 On Your Side took a closer look at those issues in light of concerns about election cybersecurity.
For Erie County officials there were no real problems in tabulating and reporting results from Tuesday's elections.
But in Monroe County it was a late-night scene in the City of Rochester as election board workers loaded up ballots and voting results information for transport to that county's election training and support center in a suburban town.
As it turns out, they could not properly upload ballot tabulation figures to their election night reporting system, so those results were delayed. That actually prompted a Congressional candidate to demand an investigation.
So on Wednesday, Monroe County election commissioners explained their IT system got overloaded with the simultaneous upload of absentee, early voting, and day-of-election ballots.
GOP Monroe County election commissioner Lisa Nicolay told reporters: "Either it is too much data because we never tested it that way before, and/or the connectivity was not wide enough bandwidth to actually accept that data and publish it. The results are not in question, OK. We can't be any clearer: The results are not in question."
She went on to say: "We really have so many checks and balances that are built into our system. Like, I am 1,000 percent comfortable that no one should worry about those votes and being tabulated. Unfortunately, the reporting system didn't work."
But other counties, such as Erie County, did the same work with proper preparation and reporting as early voting started in 2019, and more absentee balloting came about in the wake of the pandemic.
Monroe County Democratic Election Commissioner Jackie Ortiz emphasized: "We will be meeting with all stake-holders in this process to explore all possibilities."
A spokesman for the New York State elections board said there will be a meeting with Monroe County election officials to review what went wrong and how to prevent it in the future.
And they'll look at another Election Day issue in Suffolk County, Long Island, which was the crucial home district for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin.
Suffolk County had to report results in a different way, causing significant delays there as well. The State Board of Elections says a procedural change was made after Suffolk County government was hit with a major paralyzing cyberattack back in September.
While we are not aware of any direct cyberattack affecting the election process, we did confirm with the state that some National Guard troops from New York with specific cybersecurity training were actually called upon by the Governor's office and state division of homeland security and emergency management to help monitor the election.
There are National Guard troops at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station trained in cybersecurity defense tactics as well. But we could not confirm if any of them were actually involved in that election security effort.