The issue wasn’t connected to the new $7.5 million voting machine system Butler County purchased this year, election officials said, but instead with the reporting software by Tenex, the same provider of the county’s e-pollbooks.
“We don’t know exactly what happened,” said Butler County Board of Elections Deputy Director Eric Corbin. “I do not know what happened at Tenex.”
Corbin said the elections IT staff is talking with the Florida-based company to figure out what happened.
Tenex officials said there was not any unexpected outage, but they did increase the size of its server load once polls closed to handle the increased volume. Officials are still talking with Butler County elections staff to find the answer.
Butler County was to report in-office and absentee early votes by 7:45 p.m. on Tuesday night, and Corbin said they had the results in hand but could not upload them due to what is initially believed as a server issue. The board posted a PDF of the early voting results at 8:30 p.m. Corbin and Director Diane Noonan said it was “frustrating” to have the results file ready to upload but experience issues.
“We had the results file ready, and we were uploading it. We don’t know what happened,” said Corbin, who added they immediately contacted Tenex and notified the Ohio Secretary of State. “So, we’re waiting to find out what the official word is on what they say happened.”
Corbin said after their conversation with Tenex on Wednesday morning, “this isn’t going to happen in March (presidential primary). We’re going to find out.”
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