Democratic Elections Commissioner Lora Allen said results were not posted as quickly as board officials would have liked after polls closed Tuesday night because a computing firewall, which is designed to protect the electronic voting system from being compromised by outside forces, blocked results from being sent by local clerks' offices to the election board's headquarters in Lockport.
Allen said voting results from new machines designed to support voting by people with disabilities were blocked from being sent electronically to the board on Tuesday night after polls closed.
As a result, the board had to go to its backup plan — having "card runners" physically deliver containers from the voting machines with the results on them to the board of elections office.
"That's the backup plan," Allen said. "If we can't read it, you've got to come over here."
The situation caused the posting of primary results until around 10:30 p.m.
Allen said the system actually worked as intended by detecting information from the machines that it was not programmed to recognize.
"The firewall did its job," Allen said.
While the physical transfer of voting results by individuals may sound like a process that's vulnerable to tampering, Allen said that's not the case for several reasons.
She noted that the information on the devices pulled from the voting machines is encrypted, and the voting results are not revealed until they have been properly uploaded into the board's system.
"You can't read it anywhere else except the machines we have here. The clerks can't even read it. They send it here and then we upload and we can see what's on it."
In addition, Allen said, all vote tallies are backed up in two other ways — the paper ballots that voters enter into each machine, and in a printed read-out that serves as a backup vote counter on each machine.
"It's going to report the same thing," she said. "It is secure."
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