Software glitch leads Secretary of State’s Office to postpone certifying primary elections results

For the second primary election cycle in a row, the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office has delayed the certification of statewide election results due to a software glitch.

Secretary of State Sarah Copeland Hanzas had been scheduled to join political party leaders Tuesday morning to certify statewide election results after last week’s primary election — generally a formality which takes place after every statewide election, and is typically a sleepy affair. But after a delayed start, Vermont’s chief elections operator announced that the certification process would have to wait another day.

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, the issue is limited to the office’s software, which generates summary reports on election results. In a Tuesday afternoon press release, the office clarified that generating election results reports “is separate and distinct from the official counting of ballots and the local certification of results by town and city clerks” — a process in which Copeland Hanzas is fully confident.

“What I want to reassure folks is that the underlying data — the data that has been input by town and city clerks that corresponds to the ballots that Vermonters cast — is working. It’s accurate. It’s safe and secure,” Copeland Hanzas told VTDigger in an interview Tuesday afternoon. “It is simply in the report function that we use in order to pull data from every town in a senate district, or data from every town in a county, or the statewide data — that report writing function is where we discovered the errors.”

Staffers in the Secretary of State’s Office discovered the errors in the reports upon cross-checking all of the tallies Tuesday morning ahead of the scheduled certification, Copeland Hanzas said. The office opted to postpone the canvassing process for one day “to ensure that all reports precisely match the official return of votes submitted by clerks.”

“We work on a tight timeline but will always prioritize accuracy over expediency to ensure the integrity and confidence of the results that end up being certified,” Copeland Hanzas added in her statement Tuesday.

A different software issue delayed the certification of Vermont’s last primary election results in 2022. At the time, then-Secretary of State Jim Condos was overseeing the elections office. That was Vermont’s first election since lawmakers redrew the state’s legislative district lines based on the 2020 Census.

“The commonality between what happened two years ago and now is that we are operating an aging system that was built more than a decade ago,” Copeland Hanzas told VTDigger. “The system has bugs that just don’t seem to present themselves until we go to use them.”

“We hope and expect that the IT is going to work as it was designed to work,” Copeland Hanzas added. “But the reason statute gives us a week to review and certify the results is so that we can do our due diligence in making sure that we have human eyes on it.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Software glitch leads Secretary of State’s Office to postpone certifying primary elections results .