Poll watchers staying up late on election night in 2014 were miffed that Montgomery County’s full preliminary election results weren’t available until around 2:30 a.m., well after those of every other jurisdiction in the state.
Montgomery, the most populous county in Maryland, didn’t post its preliminary returns for more than two hours after Gov.-elect Larry Hogan declared victory. The slow pace of reporting is nothing new, either.
In past elections the county has lagged consistently behind other jurisdictions, which led The Washington Post’s editorial board to write in December, “when one jurisdiction… is consistently the slowpoke, people may start to wonder, and maybe grow suspicious—especially when no one can provide an explanation.”
In a memo to the Montgomery County Council released Tuesday, the county’s Board of Elections reported that the slow rate of reporting preliminary returns can be attributed to problems transmitting the results via telephone lines using modems. Elected officials in the county previously called the slow rate to post election results unacceptable in November.
The memo notes that 192 of the county’s 227 polling places are equipped to transmit preliminary results over telephone lines, but during the 2014 gubernatorial general election, only 74 polling places were able to do so successfully. Many election judges reported they weren’t able to transmit their results because they couldn’t connect to the elections office using the equipment.
The board wrote in the memo that it only has 32 phone lines, which means that connecting to the main office can take several minutes and that not every polling place can connect at once. Some judges also “forgot” which piece of equipment they were instructed to use to transmit the results while others “could not find the modem cable or had difficulty operating the equipment,” the memo said.
If the results can’t be transmitted, the results from precincts won’t be posted until judges hand deliver their precincts’ results to the office in Gaithersburg, which can include a drive of up to 20 miles. When the judges drove the results to the office, they waited in line between five and 20 minutes to deliver the voting materials, according to the memo.
Other problems included judges who took hours to close down polling stations, which includes shutting down voting machines and verifying that the number of people who voted matches the number of ballots cast, before reporting their results, according to the memo.
The problems with reporting results should be fixed when the state implements a new voting system for the 2016 presidential election that will use new technology to permit a faster turn-around time for reporting results, according to the elections board.
The council’s government operations committee is scheduled to discuss the memo with Board of Elections officials at a meeting Thursday morning.
