Ballot scanners reject paper ballots across Westchester County on midterm election day

Ballot scanners across Westchester County, New York, stopped reading hand-marked paper ballots on election day, with faults reported at 332 polling places in 44 of the county's 45 municipalities. Voters were directed to seal their ballots in orange emergency bags instead. The county accounts for roughly 30 percent of New York's 17th Congressional District, a seat that narrowly leans Democratic but has returned Republican Mike Lawler for four years; his challenger, Cait Conley, is a veteran and former Biden administration cybersecurity official. As many as 250,000 ballots could be affected.

County Executive Ken Jenkins attributed the malfunction to a programming error, according to CNN, and said alternate tabulators were being rolled out. The county Board of Elections first blamed the thickness of the paper ballots, then removed that explanation from its statement and replaced it with nothing. Ballots in the sealed bags will be scanned after polls close at 9 p.m., making delayed results in NY-17 likely.

Both candidates told voters not to leave their polling places without voting. Governor Kathy Hochul, asked in Queens, said every vote would be counted — and added that she thought she needed to say it three times.

The fraud accusations did not wait for a cause to be named. Katie Miller, wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller, posted that "this is how the Left steals elections." Laura Loomer wrote that Democrats were "already trying to steal the election in New York." Representative Claudia Tenney, chair of the House Election Integrity Caucus, posted that New York Democrats "will do anything and everything to cheat." No evidence of intent has been presented; the county, having withdrawn its own explanation, currently has none to offer.

Scanner failures are routine. New York City machines jammed in 2018, Queens reported tabulator problems in 2024, and tabulator faults surfaced this year in Florida and Oklahoma, while flooding closed polling places in Maricopa County. The day before the election, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration's demand to set aside California ballots suspected of non-citizen votes, after the Justice Department could not describe the method behind its figure of 20,000 ineligible registered voters; the prosecutions actually brought so far number 28. The government promising Westchester that every eligible vote will be counted is the same one that could not explain how it produced its own list of fraudulent voters.

Until the replacement machines arrive, the ballots sit in orange emergency bags — secured, monitored, and waiting for a scanner that can read them.