Glitches stall vote count

None of the numbers from the various races in Lancaster County in either local, state and national races are official. Computer problems with the county’s voting machine system had officials manually counting votes late into the night Tuesday.
“We have two data bases and one won’t read the other,” said Rick Crimminger, chairman of the Lancaster County Election Commission. “We are having to manually enter everything from the paper tape. However, those paper tapes are not official results. They are only printouts.”
The problems Tuesday night were not the only computer problems reported on Election Day.
Early Tuesday, poll workers were having problems with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) machines, the portable machines used by disabled voters. The problems with those machines were corrupt computer files traced to ballots for the city of Lancaster mayor’s race.
“That issue was corrected and none of those ballots were lost,” said Cassie Stump, director of the Lancaster County Election Commission.
All of the county’s IT (information technology) analysts were huddled around a bank of computers in the basement of the county administration building Tuesday night trying to figure out what to do.
But until someone from the state level could get to Lancaster to help with the problem, none of the results from Lancaster County will be official.
Crimminger hoped all the problems will be fixed by Wednesday morning and the official results released.
 

Mary Ann Hudson and Billy Lloyd, Lancaster County poll workers, type printed results from voting machines into a spreadsheet program to tally the local results Tuesday night.

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