ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WROC) – The Monroe County Board of Elections has concluded its investigation into technical issues that resulted in delayed reporting of results on Election Night in November, 2022.

Typically, early results start publishing to the county’s website shortly after 9:30 p.m. But those numbers were running behind, with the county BOE sending out advisories starting at 10:30 p.m. citing “technical difficulties”.

Results eventually started updating and in the days that followed, Election Commissioners Lisa Polito Nicolay and Jackie Ortiz assured voters their ballots were accurately counted. The suspicion was an overload of data being input all at once from absentee and early voting, in addition to ballots cast that day.

On Tuesday, the Board of Elections issued a statement explaining efforts to recreate the issues of November 8 and prevent something similar from happening again.

In December, the board staff re-ran the reporting process exactly as it was done on Election Day, but the data processed without delay. Following a conference call with the vendor and MCIS (Monroe County Information Services), it was learned that following Election Day, the RAM on the county server had been quadrupled, hence conditions were not the same as they had been when the original problem occurred.

Additional tests were run and one conclusion reached was the early voting and absentee data made up 90% of the processing time, and the majority of any delay was due to ‘transient network issues’ that were no longer present during testing.

Despite the upgrade, and the inability to re-create the backlog, the BOE announced measures to improve Election Night reporting.

• Election Night canvassing and reporting is being moved to the Brighton Training and Service Center, which runs on its own server, isolated from other county infrastructure.
• On the Monday before Election Day, BOE staff will pre-load early and absentee voting results, basically putting them in queue, but not reporting them until the polls close.

Tuesday’s report again assured voters that the 2022 results were never in question.