Election officials in Torrington had to hand count votes late into the night after issues with tabulators and ballots.
“We were able to cobble enough together to run the election, but not smoothly or very pretty,” said Torrington Registrar of Voters clerk, Melissa Randall.
Randall said things started to go south late morning Tuesday.
“The first tabulator in our largest district, it failed because -- we’re not really sure why. It just stopped accepting ballots and did not throw an error message,” she said. “We sent our backup that was sealed with a different seal to the polling place within about an hour, and that read ballots for quite a while, and then that was throwing up a message that read invalid ballot.”
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The city got a bad batch of ballots, Randall said. Just under 200 ballots had to be hand counted by her team.
“These lines along [the ballots], they’re timing marks. They have to be very precisely printed, otherwise the memory card does not read the ballot. All the names were correct, but there was something wrong with the timing marks, and I understand we weren’t the only town this happened to.”
Luckily, she said, this is the last election with these aging tabulators.
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“These tabulators are getting old, they are on their last year from my understanding, and the technology is just getting a little out of date and certainly the parts and pieces of our tabulators are failing.”
Today, her team tallied those votes and submitted them to the state.
She praised the election workers for their composure and dedication.
“None of them were unhappy to stay. They were all like 'yep, we want to get it done, we want to get it done right.' They had been working flat out for hours,” she said. “I think that they kept their composure remarkably well. When you have thousands of people coming through and getting impatient and being upset, the upset level was much lower than one would have thought and they just handled themselves like pros.”
