An mistake in a voting tabulation system that appears to have altered the outcome of one New Jersey contest was discovered more than two months after the November elections.

According to the New Jersey Globe, the outcomes of six electoral districts in four towns will be affected.

In a battle for the Ocean City Township school board, Jeffrey Weinstein, who initially trailed Steve Clayton by 20 votes, 3,523 to 3,503, is now in the lead by one vote.

The problem has been linked to Election Systems and Software’s equipment.

The mistake was identified after an internal review by the Monmouth County Board of Elections, according to a story by The Globe.

The company said an “isolated incident occurred due to a human procedural error. An audit of the system yielded this information.”

“In July of 2022, upon request, ES&S technicians were sent to Monmouth County to investigate reports of slow performance on the county’s internal network. During troubleshooting, technicians uninstalled and reinstalled the county’s election management software,” according to Katina Granger, an ES&S representative.

“A human procedural error during reinstallation excluded a step, which optimizes the system database and ensures USB flash media cannot be read twice during the results loading process. Because the database was not optimized, the user was not notified when the USB flash media were loaded twice into the results reporting module,” she said.

Granger emphasized that the system had fail-safes.

“There are reports in the system which document these types of actions, and duplication of results can be detected during reporting and canvas procedures. The USB Status Load Report identifies any USB flash media that have been loaded more than once.,” Granger said. “Additionally, pollbook data cross-referenced with the ballots cast also shows issues with the number of ballots cast.

The Board of Elections will now conduct a new vote count and recertify the election results.

Granger stated that ES&S “will reinstall the election management system which will ensure the system is optimized to detect and block duplication of USB flash media results.”

More on this story via The Western Journal:

The company’s machines are used in about a third of New Jersey’s counties.

Sussex County Clerk Jeff Parrott was irked that no widespread alert was issued about the incident. CONTINUE READING…