Second wrong election results file posted to Bergen County Clerk's site. What went wrong?

A second wrong election results file was posted on the Bergen County Clerk's website on Thursday night, which had at least 30,000 missing votes.

The first wrong file was posted to the site on Tuesday night as the first results of the election were being tallied.

The most recent wrong file was uploaded during the adjudication of write-in ballots by the Bergen County Clerk, confirmed Democrat Bergen County Clerk John Hogan on Friday. He said the file has since been removed from the site.

Each write-in ballot needs to be examined to see if it is a real vote. "If there's just a squiggly line or just one letter, that's not a vote," Hogan said. "That process went on last night and around 11 p.m. the unofficial results were updated."

Bergen County Board of Elections Chairman Richard Miller, a Republican, said the results weren't the only problems the county faced on Election Day. The new voting machines caused numerous challenges that led to lines out the door.

"There were lines like I've never seen before in Bergen County in the last 12 years I've been on the board to wait for ballots," Miller said. "This was considered a light election. There's no way we can possibly handle a presidential election like this."

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As for the first wrong file, Hogan said during the "haste" of getting the final town results in after midnight, it was uploaded, causing the results page to not upload correctly. At that point county officials reverted to uploading a correct PDF file format of the results. Oakland, Dumont and Mahwah didn't return results until close to midnight, Hogan said, which delayed the final run.

"In the course of trying to do a final run and getting the information out, a wrong file was transferred to the website late into the night," Hogan said.

The error was corrected and the results were backed up with PDF versions on the county clerk's website. The error came from a live voter turnout website that updates results with user-friendly percentages and color-coded bars, which is done by an outside company. That link has been removed from the website and only the correct PDF-style results are now up.

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"When we realized what file was different from the PDF, we took it down immediately," Hogan said. "When everyone left the office just before 2 a.m. all the correct PDF information was up."

The error was caught by Democrats who were keeping track of the totals at the Hasbrouck Heights Hilton and said they declared victory based on the PDF files online.

On Wednesday night, the file showed different vote totals than were previously there, Hogan said.

Employees were called in on Friday during their day off to finish the write-in ballot review procedure. The next time results are updated, they will include the write-in ballots, Hogan said Friday morning.

"New state laws requiring daily reporting we didn't have to do before and this is the first new voting process in 30 years," Hogan said. "This is an adjustment process. We already know we need a larger server and a number of other things."

Hogan said he is preparing a report to present to the Bergen County Commissioners next week to go over what happened.

"At the end of the day, these are still unofficial results until we certify them," Hogan said. "We are trying to get numbers out as soon as possible, but now we are slowing things down to make sure nothing else happens."

Certified results typically happen 10 days after an election, but Hogan said he doesn't have an exact date of when the most recent results will be complete. Mail-in ballots sent out on election day have six days to arrive, and then provisionary ballots will be verified with the Superintendent of Elections, which is a manual process, Hogan said.

New voting machines

This was the first major election where Bergen County voters encountered new voting machines.

On Election Day, voters found a number of small issues including printer problems.

Miller said as the day went on, election officials found blank ballots were printed, machines blowing out fuses, and toner and printing problems.

The new machines have replaced the 30-year-old ones that far exceeded their lifespan, said Superintendent of Elections and Commissioner of Registration Debra Francica.

The new machines were rolled out in June for the primary election, where 29,763 or 4.5% of all registered voters used the electronic ballot machines.

The Bergen County Board of County Commissioners approved a $15 million bond ordinance in April to pay for the 1,200 ballot-marking devices and 650 tabulators.

Miller said the voting machine recommendations came from Hogan and Francica despite his rebuttal. He said he recommended the same new machines used in Passaic and Hudson counties.

“We had numerous problems and to push it off like everything went OK, I’m sorry it didn’t happen that way,” Miller said.

The new machines also came with more equipment that must be returned to the county on election night, which delayed towns turning in results, officials said.

Despite the new voting machines, it would have taken the same amount of time to gather results, Francica said after the election. The only difference was the amount of equipment that local town clerks needed to collect and return.

Each polling location in each town needed to be closed out. There are sim cards, ballot scanners, two sealed tote bags of tally strips, result cards and paper ballots, and electronic tablets with voter information on them.

“It’s a lot to take back and not just the two tote bags of results anymore,” Francica said. “There is a lot more equipment that has to be loaded out and synced up and can’t be left out because there is voter history on it. It’s a lot more complicated with the equipment.”

Francica said for the larger municipalities with more than 20 polling locations, it took them some time to return everything.

The many moving parts are time-consuming and produce less privacy, he said. “It backs up lines,” Miller said. “Even early voting in Teaneck there were lines out the door.”

“The answer is to admit you made a mistake and go and get the machines we should have gotten in the first place,” Miller said.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bergen County Clerk's office posts another wrong election results file