‘Deep dive’ of Election Night woes is planned

Ulster County officials said Tuesday that higher-than-anticipated traffic on the county’s redesigned Board of Elections website led to the site crashing numerous times on Election Night as results were coming in.

Assistant Deputy County Executive Dan Torres said the executive’s office is working with the Board of Elections and the county’s Department of Information Services to do a “deep dive” into why the website was unable to handle the traffic and ensure the problem doesn’t happen again.

“There was significant traffic to the website that forced it to crash,” Torres said. “There was more traffic than was anticipated.”

Republican Commissioner of Elections Thomas Turco said between 53,000 and 54,000 voters, or 45 to 50 percent of the registered voters in the county, cast ballots in the election. Turco called that turnout “average” for an election in an oddnumbered year, when local races dominate.

Four countywide positions — executive, comptroller, district attorney and judge — were on this year’s ballot in Ulster County, as were all 23 seats in the county Legislature and myriad

elected positions in the city of Kingston, all 20 towns in the county and the village of Ellenville.

The Board of Elections’ results website crashed almost immediately after the polls closed, leaving it next to impossible to get results, except for sporadic instances. But even in those rare instances when the site could be accessed, only the results from pre-Election Day voting were available.

Sometime after 10 p.m., the Department of Information Services reverted to a stripped-down version of the website, which was used in previous years, and election results finally began to flow.

But those numbers didn’t include the early voting results, which led to inaccurate totals being posted and left some candidates thinking they had won an election they actually lost or were trailing in races in which they actually were leading.

Then, about 11:30 p.m., one of the two technicians responsible for uploading election results to the website collapsed at the Board of Elections office in Uptown Kingston and had to be rushed to a hospital.

“We had just gotten out of a meeting in my office,” Turco said. “We had just come up with a way to combine the early voting numbers with the election night numbers when he collapsed.

“We ran out, and there he was on the floor. He was unconscious but still breathing, thankfully,” Turco said. He said the worker was transported to a hospital in an ambulance and stayed there overnight. (He since has returned to work.)

At that point, Turco said, election officials decided to shut down for the night and go to the hospital with their colleague. The decision came with results from 10 percent of the county’s voting precincts not included in the posted tallies.

Complete tallies from Election Day and the nineday early voting period weren’t posted until just before noon the next day.

Still to be counted are the more than 2,400 absentee and affidavit ballots.

Turco said 3,682 absentee ballots were issued before the election and that as of Tuesday afternoon, 2,417 had been returned. He said there also are 428 affidavit ballots that have to be considered and potentially counted.

The Board of Elections will begin counting the absentee and affidavit ballots at 10 a.m. Nov. 18. Turco predicted it will be “a minimum of two weeks” before the final results are certified.

The outcomes of several elections hinge on absentee ballots, most notably the race for Ulster County district attorney, in which Republican Michael Kavanagh and Democrat David Clegg are in a virtual dead heat, with Kavanagh leading by just three votes.

Control of the Ulster County Legislature also could be decided by absentee votes.