Although smooth across the board from polling precincts, there were some internal stressors between the County Executive and members of the Board of Elections working together.
Dozens of emails went back and forth between the County Executive, the Clerk of Elections and members of the Board of Elections about getting the appropriate amount of I-T support needed without overstepping.
In the past, when people wanted to see the results on election night, they would go to the county's website and could see the results. This website was through the county that the election office used. Someone from the county IT department would help the election office input the results throughout the evening.
Andre Horton, the Board of Elections Chairman explained, "We were totally dependent on Erie County's IT department, whom we thought in years passed worked for the county and the citizens of the count, but the County Executive has politicized the office and made it directly under him"
This year, the Board of Elections and election office decided to go through a new third party vendor called "Clarity" for the election results and not use the county's website to post the election results. Therefore the responsibility of the inputting the results would fall to the elections office and not the county. The county could provide IT support in terms of crashes or computer issues, but they couldn't help with election related issues, like data entry or emails.
This weekend, the Clerk of Election reached out to the county IT department for assistance on several different issues, like uploading news releases and making sure information was easy to find, the IT department was able to help with some requests, but couldn't help with other requests like creating spreadsheets or sending out emails since they dealt with the election and they couldn't interfere.
As County Executive Brenton Davis explained, "The administration and the IT person by law are segregated from the elections process, so we in no way can assists in sending emails or meddling in the elections in any way."
Over the weekend, Davis laid out ways the county could support the election office without overstepping. As Davis explained, "The administration appointed seven points, seven points of custody to ensure there was transparency around technology and how it interacts and how my staff interacts and that segregated my folks were no way associated in any form of election operations."
According to members of the Board of Elections, on Tuesday afternoon, they still wanted more help from the county IT department that the county was not providing because they say they couldn't. The Board of Elections reached out to the county solicitor and the county council solicitor for guidance and Judge John Trucuilla had to get involved as well. A resolution was reached that county IT support was provided but someone from the elections office had to be the one to input the results.
As Davis explained, "Previously it was the role of it for the county to upload the election results to the website. Last year, the Board of Elections and several members that are on the board this year voted to hire a third party, like they did through Election IQ that failed with the mail in ballots. They hired a third party to do the reporting. So the only role it has is to maintain the county website and embed the link provided by this third party . So essentially our it people have no role inputting the data from the elections, giving it to the third party and it automatically updates on a website outside of a county website."
Horton is hopeful that they can learn from what happened on election night and move so issues like these don't arise in the future, "We are going to evaluate, just like we do over everything but our processes, but this event gives us the opportunity to examine our processes and see what we can do better and see what we did really really well."
Erie News Now reached out to the Erie County Clerk for comment but she did not get back to us.