With a number of potentially close races expected, it was already likely going to be a long night for elections workers in New Jersey. But an unexplained glitch in one county could make that night even longer.
Hundreds of scanners have been unable to read ballots in Mercer County, causing headaches for election officials. It could be days before tens of thousands of votes are tabulated, but workers said every vote will count — eventually.
A reason for the tabulating error at more than 100 voting locations in the county Tuesday has not been provided, though it forced county election administrators to improvise. Instead of having voters scan their own ballots at polling places, officials had them drop their paper in bins. Those votes will be transported to and scanned at a central location: the county's board of elections.
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"So everybody is going to vote, just like they always do...they only difference is instead of scanning it into the voting machine, you're going to place it in there and we're going to scan it back at the board of elections tonight," said Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Colello.
The high-capacity scanners that will count ballots after the Mercer County polls close are the same scanners that count mail-in ballots, election workers said. The area where they are counted is monitored by surveillance video, and during the scanning, the public is allowed to watch from behind a glass window.
Some voters expressed frustration that advance testing didn’t catch the glitch before Election Day. Dominion Voting Systems, the company behind the scanners, said the problem is the county’s ballot, not their equipment.
For her part, the Mercer County Clerk said she’s been using the same ballot printer for at least 16 years, and these same Dominion machines worked in the last three elections.
"The ballots are reviewed by Dominion, they work together. We pre-test, so we're going to find out where exactly the problem lies," said Sollami Colello.
Dominion Voting Systems is no stranger to election controversy. The company recently filed defamation lawsuits against conservative media companies, accusing them of falsely blaming Dominion for former President Trump’s 2020 election defeat.
The company has denied all claims of vote tampering or ties to foreign governments, and the U.S. government has found no evidence vulnerabilities in Dominion machines have been exploited.
