Voters deserved better from the Westchester Board of Elections

Brett Freeman

The Nov. 4 election was a reminder of just how fragile public trust can be when basic systems fail.

The Westchester County Board of Elections’ handling of results was nothing short of unacceptable. By failing to include the early-voting tallies until well into the Wednesday workday, the county created a wave of misinformation that rippled across every major local news outlet — including ours.

Our website, which receives more than 100,000 page-views each month, published preliminary results Tuesday night based on data from the county website. So did News 12. So did Lohud. We all had egg on our faces by Wednesday morning when the “final” results told a different story.

To be clear: Westchester did label the numbers as unofficial — as every county does. Nothing is certified until results are formally approved many days later. But “unofficial” shouldn’t equate to incomplete to the point of misleading. It’s 2025. There is simply no excuse for a county agency not to have integrated the early-vote totals into its initial posting — or, at minimum, to clearly indicate they were missing. Transparency and accuracy are not optional on election night; they’re the entire point.

Contrast that with the Putnam County Board of Elections. Their website began with early votes and then added the Election-Day totals as they came in — a clear, logical process that gave the public quick and accurate information. If Putnam can do it, why can't Westchester?

In one particularly stark example, in Yorktown the early-vote tally represented more than 40% of the voting electorate for two of the candidates. That’s huge — and it makes the omission of those numbers not just a glitch but a big gap in public information.

In the days since, we’ve learned more about how the confusion happened. Local party leaders told us that volunteers are dispatched to each polling district around 9 p.m. to collect results, then return to headquarters to add them up by hand. In Yorktown, at least one party was unsure whether the totals it obtained included early votes — meaning even those closest to the process didn’t know the real outcome until Wednesday morning.

One poll worker from another town told us that early votes are treated as if they come from a separate “polling station,” each with its own thumb-drive of results. That means the Board would have received those numbers around the same time as every other district’s — they just didn’t include them in the initial release on their website.

We were angry, and rightly so. Our newsletter — which we send to roughly 14,000 readers — carried headlines based on those same incomplete results. Unlike stories on our website, newsletters are static. Once they’re sent, the headline is locked in. The stories that they link to may update, but the static image on the newsletter remains.

So here’s the irony: in trying to avoid misleading our readers, we’ll now be writing more click-baity headlines. Not the dishonest kind — just the kind that force you to click through to see who actually won. It’s not how we prefer to do things, but until the county can manage to publish complete and accurate information on election night, it’s the only responsible choice.

Westchester County voters — and every journalist trying to serve them — deserve a system that works as hard for democracy as they do.