System glitch caused some election night confusion in Kane County

If you were tracking election night results in Kane County and found yourself scratching your head when vote totals decreased, you weren’t alone.

The Kane County Clerk’s election website was shut down about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 4, after officials realized a problem in uploading reports from the county’s tabulating system. When the website came back online a little after midnight, some unofficial vote tallies were lower than they were before the website went down.

So, what happened?

As votes come in from polling places, they are tabulated at the county clerk’s office on a separate closed system. Throughout the count, the process is paused to upload results onto a USB drive, which then is plugged into another computer to post results to the website, said Roger Fahnestock, who leads the Kane County IT department.

“We had a problem between the file that came over and the webpage that presents those results,” Fahnestock said.

He said the issue created some “strange results” and the website was shut down until the problem could be fixed.

“It was an error,” Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham said April 5. “And when we found it, we corrected it as quickly as we could.”

Though some candidates saw their numbers drop when the results came back online, Fahnestock said they can be confident in knowing that the numbers online, which still are unofficial vote totals, accurately reflect the numbers from the tabulators, which operate on a separate system. He stressed there was never a problem with the tabulating machines; rather it was the process of uploading information from the USB file to the website that created discrepancies.

Voters can find unofficial vote tallies under the election tab on the Kane County clerk’s page. A PDF version of the tabulator results also is available on the website.

Votes will not be certified until April 25, the last day to canvass the vote. Vote-by-mail ballots postmarked April 4 can be counted until April 18.

As of April 5, 25,028 of the 38,952 vote-by-mail ballots issued had been returned to the county clerk.

https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20230405/system-glitch-caused-some-election-night-confusion-in-kane-county