Lauren Feuer, 42, spent six hours on Tuesday as a volunteer poll watcher at a voting location in Pelham, N.Y., some 15-and-a-half miles north of Midtown Manhattan. The Jewish New Rochelle resident saw the voting machine malfunctions, which have made national news, directly.
“I walked in and all the voting machines were down,” she told JNS. “They were using the secure bags for the ballots.”
Those canvas bags have locks on top, according to Feuer.
“They’re normally used for spoiled ballots, like if somebody fills their ballot out wrong and wants to get a new one,” she said. “It’s one big bag for all the ballots.”
Bag-holders are not allowed to touch the ballots, so voters have to place their ballots directly into bags, she said.
The New York State Board of Elections said on Tuesday that voting machines throughout Westchester County malfunctioned due to a programming update “that occurred after the initial preparation and testing of Election Day voting equipment.”
The issue affects one of this year’s key House races, with Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) trying to win re-election in New York’s 17th Congressional District. The race is a likely bellwether for Republicans across the country hoping to hold on to swing districts in what polls suggest will be a difficult year for the GOP.
According to the state election board, voting machines in one municipality in the county were updated, while voting machines elsewhere in the county were not and “therefore could not recognize the ballots being used for Election Day.”
The board stated it is working with the Westchester County Board of Elections to “deploy replacement election media using the updated programming” and that the “immediate priority is to restore scanning capability to at least one machine at every polling location, with additional machines brought online as the day progresses.
In addition to observing the voting process, which Feuer volunteered to do on behalf of the Republicans, her role was also to “look around and listen to what the workers are telling people, making sure nothing funny is happening,” she told JNS.
Feuer said she observed enough Democratic volunteers that they could take one-hour shifts, but Republican volunteers “had much longer shifts.”
Feuer told JNS that she volunteered, because “I don’t know if everybody feels 100% comfortable that things aren’t happening behind the scenes with the ballots, so the only way I know I could know is if I participated in the process.”
“I think when they say, ‘Vote or die,’ for Jews that might be literal,” she said.
Lawler, who is pro-Israel, told reporters on Tuesday that he is working with his Democratic opponent, Cait Conley, a former official on the Biden administration’s National Security Council, to agree on a vote-counting procedure in court.
“We are close to finalizing an agreement between both sides to go to the court and present to a judge for sign-off,” he said.
Votes already cast in emergency ballot bags will be counted later this evening.
“Those ballots will not be opened at the polling site,” he said. “They will be opened at the board of elections, where attorneys from both campaigns will be, where both parties will have representation, so that there be no question, that there be no conspiracy theory and that every vote is counted.”
JNS sought comment from the Lawler and Conley campaigns and from Rep. George Latimer (D-N.Y.) and Joe Cinquemani, whose race in New York’s 16th Congressional District has also been affected. The Cook Political Report rates Latimer’s seat as a “solid” Democratic hold.
New York state and local election officials and Lawler all said that they were confident that every vote would be counted.
Michael Mittelman, president of the Westchester Jewish Council, a non-partisan nonprofit with 126 member organizations, told JNS that “every election, it is important for the Jewish community to come out and vote and participate in the democratic process.”
The Westchester Jewish Council told its community on Tuesday that, based on the Election Board update, “everyone should feel confident in coming out to vote today.”
Mittelman told JNS that he voted early and in person.
“From my experience, the Board of Elections does a good job of posting the election results to their website relatively quickly,” he said.
