Monroe County commissioners say results of election are accurate, issue was delay in reporting

ROCHESTER, N.Y. —The Monroe County Board of Elections commissioners say the results of the 2022 election are accurate, following an hours-long delay in reporting them on Tuesday night.

Republican Commissioner Lisa Nicolay and Democratic Commissioner Jackie Ortiz held a press conference on Wednesday to ensure voters that their votes counted, “the results are not in question, we can’t be any clearer… the results are not in question,” Nicolay said. 

“The results were collected, tabulated and recorded as normal without any problems,” said Ortiz who went on to explain the issues were related to the website the county uses to report results publically.  

Absentee ballots were counted on Election Day, instead of weeks later, for the first time because New York State changed its laws. Nicolay said that the upload of data from the absentee ballots near the same time as the Election Day ballots and the Early Voting ballots overwhelmed the reporting system.

Election results typically start to post shortly after polls close at 9 p.m. Instead, the website didn’t update and the Board of Elections had to communicate the results by sending out PDF documents instead.

To fix the website-based reporting, a bipartisan team from the Board of Elections workers took the files to a different location with better bandwidth.

Nicolay said that voters should feel like their vote is secure because the Board of Election has information from ballots stored in four different ways. That includes the original paper ballot, voting receipt, electronic copy, and original ballot data.

“I’m 1,000 comfortable that no one should worry about those votes and being tabulated. Unfortunately, the reporting system didn’t work,” Nicolay said.

The commissioners said they did test the reporting system before election day however, it’s difficult to run tests on the system using the large amount of data they had on election night.

The Monroe County Board of Elections says it is continuing to investigate what happened and how it can avoid future problems, “we’re going to do some investigating and work with County IT and anybody else who’s interested to make it quicker and faster and better for next time but we stand by the results and we appreciate people’s patience,” Nicolay added.

All the issues with reporting have been resolved and you can see the results here.

You can see the full conference on the delays here: