As of noon yesterday—a full month after Election Day—the Columbia County Board of Elections still was showing incomplete and outdated results of the November 5th election. A nudge from this site appears to have changed that.
Since the mess of Election Day and the ensuing weeks of confusion, the Board had recanvassed and counted many additional results, along with those gathered from early tallies. But strangely, the BOE had not added these to tallies to publicly-released numbers.
As of midday on December 3rd, its site had not been updated since November 21st. Those incomplete. results showed several candidates losing, who had since been known to have won. Considering the many mistakes, omissions, and errors which have plagued the Board this cycle, it seemed all the more odd that it would not have rushed to correct these numbers.
This site messaged the two Election Commissioners, Democrat Virginia Martin and Republican Jason Nastke, asking why results were still incomplete—and when totals for each candidate would be included, so that the public could easily see who had won or lost. (Other Boards present results in clear, and sometimes even graphical form; the CC BOE is still using very old spreadsheet technology, and seems to struggle to publish results to the web.)
The courtesy of a response was not received from either Commissioner. But lo and behold! by 3:30 pm, the Board had suddenly updated the numbers to what appear to be near-final results.
Town results appear at this link; Countywide results are at this one.
It had also, finally, provided totals for each candidate, so that visitors did not need to do the math from multiple party lines to understand them. In several cases, the winners of the election had reversed since November 21st.
CAVEAT: One candidate who has been watching the results closely says that some of the Board’s numbers are very slightly off by 2 or 3 votes—appearing to not include some emergency ballot results.
