SLEEPY HOLLOW, N.Y. — Westchester County ballot tabulators malfunctioned across the county Tuesday, alarming voters and fueling a flurry of conspiracy theories online.
The issue was discovered early in the morning, after ballot tabulators failed to scan voters’ hand-marked paper ballots in 44 out of 45 of the county’s municipalities. State election officials said in a post on X that the issue was due to a programming error.
Election officials directed voters to put their ballots in secure orange ballot bags, following standard contingency plans.
The news has raised alarm amongst voters and onlookers. In text chains and Facebook posts viewed by NBC News, Westchester voters discussed the issue, with some expressing concern over whether their votes would be counted.
Tensions are high in part because Westchester is home to a key House race in the battle for control of Congress: in the 17th Congressional District, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler faces Democrat Cait Conley in a close race. The district narrowly leans blue, but Lawler has held it for four years by maintaining high popularity and campaigning aggressively on crime and affordability issues. Conley, a veteran and former Biden cybersecurity official, hopes to capitalize on the president’s sagging approval ratings in her challenge.
In social media posts, both candidates urged voters not to be dissuaded by the tabulator issues.
Ken Jenkins, the Westchester County Executive, said Tuesday afternoon that alternate tabulators are being rolled out, he said, and the ballots stored in secure bags will be counted after polls close at 9 p.m.
“Long-established emergency ballot procedures have been implemented, where completed ballots are secured, under bipartisan control, and will be counted,” the New York State Board of Elections said in a Tuesday statement posted on X. “While technical issues can be frustrating, contingency procedures exist for precisely these circumstances.”
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, told reporters that the ballots would be counted.
“Every vote will be counted; I think I need to say that three times. Every vote will be counted, every vote will be counted,” she said in Queens on Tuesday morning. “It’s being resolved in a bipartisan way that it’s supposed to. The backup plan is in place, so voters in Westchester should feel very confident.”
Isolated ballot scanner issues are routine, though the problems have been been particularly common in New York state. In 2018, scanners jammed across New York City, while Queens reported tabulator issues in 2024.
This year, ballot tabulator issues also occurred in other states including Florida and Oklahoma, while other issues like power outages and flooding shuttered some polling sites, including some in Maricopa County.
Online influencers supportive of the Republican party and some officials saw an opportunity in the malfunctioning machines and polling location closures, framing them as a conspiracy against party candidates.
“The Democrats are already cheating” posted Loomer Unleashed, a podcast associated with close Trump ally Laura Loomer, about power outages in Maricopa County. In reality, heavy rain and flooding have caused polling location issues across the county. The ballot counting issues in New York have sparked similar accusations, including from an elected official.
“The Democrats in NY will do anything and everything to cheat,” posted Rep. Claudia Tenner, R-N.Y., the chair of the House Election Integrity Caucus.
“Democrats are already trying to steal the election in New York today,” Loomer wrote on social media, her post garnering over 100,000 views.
“This is how the Left steals elections,” wrote Katie Miller, conservative podcast host and wife of White House advisor Steven Miller.
The nascent accusations echo similar narratives President Trump and his supporters raised in past elections. The most famous of these false narratives claimed machines stole votes away from Republicans, costing them the 2020 Presidential election. Yet technical failures are common, officials have warned, as are conspiracies about those malfunctions.
Researchers studying false online information have been worried about the potential for such accusations to recirculate as normal glitches get misrepresented. Such narratives could pave the way toward challenging the results of the election, several researchers told NBC News ahead of the midterms.
In Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the county’s top election official said normal issues were getting far more attention than usual.
“It’s not uncommon to have some voting machines cause us a few problems early in the day. It’s a common occurrence,” said Doug Sanderson, the county’s election board secretary. “Many times we wouldn’t hear about it other than from our precinct officials, I just think perhaps the climate and the sensitive everyone has around this election causes people to be a little bit more on edge than they normally would be.”
Offline in Westchester County, voting at a Sleepy Hollow polling site at a social club called the Fraternal Order of Eagles appeared to be proceeding smoothly. A regular flow of voters trickled in and out through the lunch-hour in the Hudson River Valley town, most having already heard via text message or from friends and neighbors that the scanners were not functioning.
As of 12:30 p.m ET, of the 225 people who had voted at that location, only two walked away on account of the tabulators being down.
“One was pretty disrespectful,” a poll worker named Dennis told NBC News, declining to share his last name. “The other said maybe they’d come back later.”
