A majority of polling sites across Westchester County, New York experienced scanner malfunctions on Election Day, November 3rd. Ballots fed into machines were rejected and stuffed into orange emergency bags. By late Tuesday night, Rep. Mike Lawler — the Republican incumbent in New York's 17th congressional district — was conceding.
"When all of the votes are counted tomorrow in Westchester, it's going to be pretty clear that we will be short," Lawler said.
The malfunction wasn't a power surge. It wasn't a cyberattack. It was a software update. County officials confirmed that a programming change made for one local contest — applied after the machines had already been tested — caused scanners across multiple towns to reject ballots outright. Towns that didn't receive the update ran fine. Towns that did became collection points for orange bags full of uncounted votes.
Those bags were transported to a county warehouse, where counting resumed on Wednesday, November 4th. Both parties were allowed to designate observers for the process. New York Attorney General Letitia James issued a statement assuring voters their ballots would be counted: "Westchester voters can still safely fill out and turn in their ballots at their polling locations. Your votes will count."
Comforting words from the same attorney general who spent four years trying to bankrupt Donald Trump through civil litigation. Her track record on impartial election administration is exactly as long as you'd expect.
The sequence matters here. Machines get tested. Machines pass. Then someone pushes a software update for a single local race, and that update bricks the scanners in the congressional district where a Republican incumbent is fighting for his seat. The towns that got the update couldn't read ballots. The towns that didn't had no problems. Nobody has explained who authorized the update, who decided which towns received it, or why it wasn't tested before deployment on Election Day.
This is the second post-midterm race in a week where "irregularities" surfaced in a contest Republicans were expected to compete in. A missing memory card in Georgia. Scanner failures in Westchester. Two races, two sets of mechanical failures, and the math lands the same way both times.
United Voice first reported the Westchester breakdown. The details aren't complicated. A software change nobody can explain went to machines nobody retested in a district where a Republican needed every vote counted correctly on the first pass.
Lawler conceded late on election night. The orange bags went to the warehouse. The warehouse count happened the next day with observers present. The attorney general said everything was fine.
The software update went out after testing. Nobody has named who authorized it.