A poll worker’s view of Westchester’s Election Day fiasco

Don Scott

Election Day 2026 started with my alarm going off at 4:30 a.m.

As a Republican election inspector, more commonly known as a poll worker, I had to report for duty at my polling location by 5 a.m. The polls needed to be ready for the first voter who would arrive at 6 a.m. The last email from the Westchester Board of Elections foreshadowed what lay ahead: “Election Day is only hours away, and we are counting on you to help make it run smoothly!”

Our first voter arrived a few minutes before 6 and patiently waited to complete her ballot at 6:00 sharp. Her ballot was fed into the scanner and promptly rejected with the message "scanner error." A few more attempts, a spoiled ballot, and an attempt with a new ballot. No dice. Scanner error again.

Calls to friends at other polling locations confirmed that the same thing was happening everywhere. It was a countywide disaster. Scanners were not working. Houston, we have a problem.

A lot of head-shaking from voters and poll workers. The Board of Elections (BOE), had one job and 364 days to prepare for this moment. That's not the way it's supposed to work. Their annual budget is $28 million. Their recent capital investment of $10 million in new equipment had just been rendered useless.

Just like Apollo 13, the mission had changed. Forget fixing the machines for the moment. Election workers must do three things: collect the votes, secure the votes and count the votes. We were able to do two out of three after a contingency plan was developed and communicated, sort of, on the fly. Ballots were completed and put into the now-famous orange security bags, which started filling up, requiring more bags.

Different theories were circulating throughout the day as to what the problem was. The ballot paper was too wide or too thick or the print was wrong. The paper was not the problem. It turns out that on election eve, a software update was made to the machines in Ardsley to correct a ballot error. That same software change should have been made to the hundreds of machines in other towns, but it was not, resulting in a countywide failure.

It was about that time that CNN reporters and a satellite truck started to set up in front of our polling place. They were doing live hits throughout the day. This had become a national story.

The BOE created a software patch to get the system running, and election techs started scurrying around the county, installing the software update with the goal of having at least one functioning scanner in each location.

For us, the breakthrough came at 4 p.m., when they got one scanner working. For the final five hours of the day, it was a relatively normal experience.

Then, the calls and texts from angry friends started to roll in. Most were convinced that the breakdown was deliberate, designed to influence a close congressional race. Certainly understandable. My cynicism has always served me well, but in this case, the shoe doesn't fit.

I always rely on the philosophical concept known as Occam's razor, which teaches that the simplest explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is generally the right answer. In the case of this voting machine fiasco, human error is the most obvious answer. Somebody screwed up.

Having worked at the polls for several years, I am confident in the security of the system. Every step of the way, a Republican and a Democrat oversee the process. After the polls closed, county police came to our polling place to collect the sealed orange bags of paper ballots. I sat with a Democrat inspector to guard those ballots until they were picked up. It's a secure system that we can have confidence in.

No doubt, this was a huge error with significant implications. It should be investigated, and we should get a detailed report on what happened, with safeguards put in place to ensure that it never happens again. But at the same time, the Board of Elections did yeoman's work to respond to the crisis. They deserve both criticism for making the grievous error and for poor communication during the crisis, and praise for determining the problem and executing the fix under real pressure.