Election board says delayed primary results caused by firewall protection

Mark Scheer, Niagara Gazette, Niagara Falls, N.Y.
Updated ·2 min read

Jun. 28—An official with the Niagara County Board of Elections on Wednesday attributed delays in the online posting of primary election results to a hiccup involving technology designed to protect the integrity of the system.

Democratic elections Commissioner Lora Allen said results were not posted as quickly as the board would have liked after polls closed Tuesday night because a computing firewall, which is designed to protect the electronic voting system from being compromised by outside forces, blocked results from being sent by local clerks' offices to the election board's headquarters in Lockport.

Allen said voting results from new machines that are designed to support voting by people with disabilities were blocked from being sent electronically to the board on Tuesday night after polls closed.

As a result, the board had to go to its backup plan in such situations — having "card runners" physically deliver the containers with the voting results from each polling place outside the town and city of Lockport.

"That's the backup plan," Allen said. "If we can't read it, you've got to come over here."

As a result, there was some delay in getting all of the results from the primaries posted to the board of elections website. The results were up before 11 p.m., Allen noted.

In essence, she said, the system worked as intended by detecting information from the machines for disabled voters that it was not programmed to recognize.

"The firewall did its job," Allen said.

While physically moving voting data to the board of elections may sound like a process that's vulnerable to tampering, Allen said that's not possible, for several reasons.

She noted that the information on the devices pulled from the voting machines is encrypted, and the voting results are not revealed until they have been properly uploaded into the board's system.

"You can't read it anywhere else except the machines we have here. The clerks can't even read it. They send it here and then we upload and we can see what's on it."

In addition, Allen said, all vote tallies are backed up in two other ways — the paper ballots that voters enter into each machine, and in a printed read-out that serves as a backup vote counter on each machine.

"It's going to report the same thing," she said. "It is secure."