Clark County election officials scrambled late Tuesday to retrieve the electronic ballots of 127 voters left behind when polls closed at the Las Vegas Academy. Registrar of Voters Joe Gloria said Wednesday the cartridges where the data was stored were retrieved but not before delaying by several hours the release of vote totals for races in the primary election. He said that all of the votes were counted and he was confident that the cartridges were not tampered with between the voting station’s closure and their recovery. “At no time was there any chance those votes could have been in jeopardy,” Gloria said. He said that federal law requires redundancy paths, or backups, to be in place to ensure votes can be retrieved if cartridges are lost or damaged.
The ballots cast at the school were backed up both electronically and on paper, which means poll workers were able to cross-reference the backups to ensure the cartridges had not been tampered with. The cartridges were sealed before they were left behind and were still sealed when they were retrieved, he said. There is a cartridge within each voting booth, and there were five booths at the school.
“Everything was balanced,” Gloria said. “Everything was reported correctly.”
When polls close, workers are instructed to break down booths and collect cartridges, according to the closing handbook given to team leaders and poll workers.
Workers then record that they have collected the cartridges, seal them and lock them into their designated transfer cases, ready for transport.
All of those procedures were completed, Gloria said. But there was a misunderstanding at the academy as to who should transport the cartridges back to the election warehouse — where county votes are recorded and totals are confirmed — and they were left behind.
Full Article: Clark County registrar confident voting cartridges left behind weren’t compromised | Las Vegas Review-Journal.