NJ County Loses Thousands of Paper Ballots After Dominion Machine Failure

An election worker examines a ballot at the Clackamas County Elections office on Thursday,
AP Photo/Gillian Flaccus

NORTH BERGEN, New Jersey – The mayor of Robbinsville, New Jersey, confirmed Wednesday night that about 11 percent of the town’s votes had “gone missing” after voting machines failed Tuesday, forcing voting stations to resort to paper ballots.

All voting machines in central Mercer County – a mostly Democrat stronghold bolstered by voters in the state capital, Trenton, and the college town of Princeton – failed on Tuesday, the county clerk confirmed. While officials insisted that experts from the machines’ manufacturer, Dominion, were on hand to fix the problem as soon as possible, the county never announced that the machines ever came back online.

Some reports in local New Jersey media indicated on Wednesday that Dominion representatives denied that the machines failed, blaming government officials for using the wrong kind of paper ballot, causing the machine to reject the ballots as it is programmed to do.

Instead of using the machines, voters filled out paper ballots, which officials promised would be counted at a central location in Trenton, the county seat.

“Voters can still vote by completing their ballots and placing them in the top of the scanning machine in the slot where the emergency ballots are placed,” county clerk Paula Sollami Covello urged. “Everyone can vote manually, so rest assured no one will be disenfranchised.”

Both Republican and Democrat candidates urged voters to stay on lines and fill out paper ballots. On Wednesday, Sollami Covello appeared to confirm that “all ballots were collected, and every vote was counted.” She also confirmed a criminal investigation into the matter.

Mayor Dave Fried posted a statement to Robbinsville Township’s official Facebook account Wednesday night contradicting Sollami Covello’s claim that all votes had been counted:

Statement from Mayor Dave Fried:"Robbinsville Township was contacted by Mercer County Election officials at…

Posted by Robbinsville Township on Wednesday, November 9, 2022

“Robbinsville Township was contacted by Mercer County Election officials at approximately 5 p.m. today and were informed that the ballots of one of our districts had gone missing,” Fried announced. “The fundamentals of Democracy is that every vote would be counted. Clearly, this has yet to happen in Robbinsville, as approximately 11% of our residents’ votes have yet to be safely delivered and tallied.”

Fried called the incident an “unconscionable mishap” and vowed to ensure no race was called “until every single ballot is counted and done so securely.”

Fried’s remarks triggered a slew of outraged comments on the town’s Facebook page.

“Big surprise I felt like I was just throwing my ballot in the recycling bin,” one user wrote.

Local reports depicted a rudimentary process for paper ballot voting that left many with limited trust in the voting system.

Exasperated Trentonian columnist Jeff Edelstein jokingly suggested Thursday that New Jersey replace its election officials with corporate leaders from Chick-fil-A and Amazon, writing, “I’m not a stop the steal guy, I don’t think the elections are rigged, I trust the system, but sheesh oh man, are you freaking kidding me?”

“Well, if you live in Mercer County and went to vote on Tuesday, you were faced with a big sheet of paper and a Sharpie,” he narrated. “And then you filled out your big sheet of paper with the Sharpie and noticed that the Sharpie — being a Sharpie — bled through each side.”

“And then you noticed the bleed-through doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a big issue when they count the votes, because it doesn’t bleed through into an actual voting box, but still: It bleeds through,” he noted.

Multiple local New Jersey media outlets confirmed that three districts in Princeton also lost ballots, resulting in thousands of votes currently uncounted. The New Jersey Globe noted that the total missing votes in Princeton amount to about 3,211 people whose preferences have not been counted. In Robbinsville, 835 votes went missing, meaning 4,046 ballots are missing.

“A race for the Robbinsville school board, where 103 votes separate Peter Oehlberg and Christopher Emigholz, could be affected by the lost ballots,” the Globe observed. “So could a Princeton school board contest where 67 votes separate Deborah Bronfeld and Rita Rafalvovsky.”

The county losing paper ballots is a separate complication for New Jersey officials from that of actually counting the thousands of paper ballots necessary to keep the election going on Tuesday. As of Thursday morning, the county had not finished counting ballots that have not gone missing, leaving critical races such as the mayor’s race in Trenton unresolved.

“Partial results have been posted on the County’s website, but so far shows only 56,975 of the 236,158 registered voters in Mercer County, which is only 24% voter turnout in a county that had 53% turnout in 2018, the last midterm election,” the Trentonian reported Wednesday night.

Early on Tuesday, Mercer County officials announced that they had discovered a “printing and scanning issue,” as the local news site NJ.com described it, that made it impossible for the machines to process votes.

“Poll workers will be on hand to walk voters through the process,” the County’s official Facebook page said at the time. “The board is working with Dominion, the machine maker, to resolve the issue.”

Sollami Covello called the problem a “glitch” with Dominion’s machines.

“We have Dominion and other IT professionals coming down to fix the problem. No voter should walk away,” she promised.

The problem was not resolved on Tuesday, and the nature of the malfunction remains unconfirmed at press time. Radio station NJ 101.5 reported Wednesday, however, that Dominion contested Sollami Covello’s claim that its machines had failed, claiming, instead, that New Jersey officials had used the wrong type of paper or ink, so the machine rejected the ballots.

“New Jersey 101.5’s David Matthau and Dan Alexander reported the maker of the machines, Dominion, claimed their machines ‘functioned exactly as they should by rejecting incorrectly printed ballots,'” the station relayed.

“We are actively working with Royal Printing and Mercer County election officials on this issue,” Dominion said in a statement.

The radio station reached out to Royal Printing, which created the ballots. The company reportedly insisted “there were no problems at all with the ballots, and pointed the blame back at the Dominion machines.”

Sollami Covello later said on Wednesday that the county had tested the machines prior to the election and they had worked without a problem, but somewhere in between the test and Election Day, the type of paper used for the ballots changed. The county still has no clarity regarding who made the decisions that led to that change.

An unnamed election expert explained to NJ.com that the ballots have bar codes the machine reads, and “if the code is not recognized to the machine’s programming, it will not accept the ballot.”

“We know there was a discrepancy in the timing marks that are used by the scanners,” Sollami Covello had told reporters Wednesday. “We’re hoping to figure it out.”

The county clerk announced she had engaged prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into the matter.

“Not only are we having it investigated internally, but we already have reported it to criminal authorities because we want to make sure that nothing nefarious took place in this election,” she said. “I have asked for a criminal investigation. We have to obviously act.”

Sollami Covello had boasted in an editorial in September that elections in the county were “safer than ever,” thanks to Dominion technology.

“The machines purchased by Mercer County were the Dominion ICP machines and tabulators. They use advanced optical scanning technology,” her article boasted. “This is considered to be the safest way to vote among voter safety experts because while computers may be hacked, paper cannot.”

Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.

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