Kootenai County Clerk Cliff Hayes sent out a press release explaining the delay in posting Tuesday’s election results online.
As reported in the release, there was a malfunction in the software which translated the tabulators’ results into a format which allowed those results to be posted on the County’s website. The vote tabulating equipment, the equipment which reads the marked ballots and tabulates the results, performed without malfunction, so the election results were accurately tabulated.
OpenCdA asked Deputy Clerk Pat Raffee if the software malfunction affected only the results we consumers would see online on the County’s website, or did it also affect the Clerk’s ability to report the results accurately to the Secretary of State’s Office. Deputy Clerk Raffee responded:
“We posted the same results to the Secretary of State that we posted to the website, at almost the same time, as usual. So the period we had no postings on the website, the SOS got no data from us either; and when we picked back up posting to the website, we sent data to the SOS’s office again.”
So for those who might have been wondering, the software malfunction in Kootenai County on Tuesday night-Wednesday morning did not result in inaccurate information being sent to the Secretary of State’s office.
Accuracy was more important than speed. That’s as true in reporting the results of the election as in tabulating them.