Twenty days after company officials told Johnson County residents technicians were “working around the clock” to identify the issue, Election Systems & Software said this morning that it had rewritten a portion of the software code that led to a massive delay in reporting primary election results earlier this month. But it’s not a guarantee that the updated software will be approved for use in November’s elections. “The slow reporting of results was unacceptable, and we apologize,” said Tom Burt, president and CEO, ES&S. “We know the Election Office and other Johnson County Government leaders put their faith in us and we let down our valued partners. After exhaustive analysis to pinpoint the issue, we rewrote the portion of code that caused the issue, and initial tests of the optimized code were successful. We will continue testing, and we look forward to federal certification of the optimized software.”
The company and Johnson County issued a joint press release Monday morning with an update on the investigation into what caused the problem and how the company plans to address it. ES&S says it is performing “extensive testing” of the new software.
However, the company acknowledged it cannot be certain the updated software will be certified by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) in time for it to be used in the November election.
Consequently, the company said it is working on a contingency plan.