KING COUNTY, Wash. — Users of the King County Elections website were sporadically getting error messages instead of information on Tuesday night and much of Wednesday.
It’s the same website voters access to check on the status of the ballots or to see the results on election night.
“Super anxious. This is a lot happening with a lot of different changes in our society, in our community,” said Agnes Opong, of Bellevue, as she dropped her ballot off at King County Elections headquarters in Renton.
Elections' division Chief of Staff Kendall Hodson has been hearing from voters, “Our voters are very anxious right now. And I completely understand that when you go to track your ballot, you got to get information, and you see some sort of an error or an issue with the website. It’s absolutely alarming.”
Ballots continue to pour in. In King County, turnout is now upward of 60%.
But the sporadic website outages are not affecting the internal systems that workers use. Computer engineers are working to fix the website the public uses.
“They know for sure that it is not a cyberattack or outside actor trying to cause problems with the website,” said Hodson.
All of King County’s sites are affected, and engineers believe it’s an equipment problem. King County Elections has contingency plans if it isn’t fixed by election night.
“We’ve got a bunch of different mechanisms to make sure we can get results out, and we’ll let folks know as soon as we have to make that kind of a change which, again, we don’t expect to have to make. But we’ve got the plans in place if we do,” Hodson said.
The machines that count the votes are not at risk — they’re never connected to the internet.
But voters are concerned about getting election results in a timely manner.
“It is a concern, and that might be the case, so we have to be patient enough for the right thing to happen. That every vote, that every ballot be counted, and then do a decision and let it be known,” said Simone Terrell, a voter from Renton.