Shortly after the election, I updated this site to congratulate Mikie Sherrill on her win, and I also promised you all that I would soon be posting the results of your write-in votes. To be exact, this is what I had written:
"Within the next few weeks, I will be obtaining the vote counts from each of the counties (as the NJ State Division of Elections has indicated to me that it might not receive the write-in results), and I will then post those results here on this website,
such that all of you can know for certain how well we ended up doing".
However I have since been unable to do so, because even after more than a month and a half of my repeated and dogged efforts, I am still unable to post the results of your write-in votes for me. This is because of a number of reasons:
- For one, it turns out that apparently that each County does things their own way, particularly with respect to the write in votes, and that the NJ state office of elections provides little (if any) supervision.
- Secondly, it appears that there are several limitations with the standard election software (which was created by the "Dominion Voting Systems" company), and in particular that there appears to be no easy way for the counties to generate the "write-in names report". This is readily apparent from the fact that out of New Jersey's 21 counties, only five counties seem to have this report available. I have contacted the remaining counties numerous times, and yet they still seem unable to provide me with the actual write-in names that people had typed in when they voted. For example, Atlantic County does not have this information whatsoever, yet it is readily available in neighboring Cape May County. For more than the past month and a half, I have contacted several individuals at Atlantic County elections (and the clerk's office) repeatedly, but they have still not gotten back to me with any information whatsoever, nor is anything posted on their website about the actual write-in names. Even the one individual who specifically wrote to me saying she would try to help me with this, even after I wrote to her 2 weeks ago to tell her that there was a specific individual in Cape May County who could tell her step-by-step how to generate the "write-in names report" from the Dominion software (which apparently is the same software that all 21 counties use), this individual still has not and gotten back to me, nor has she reached out to the lady in Cape May County to learn how to do it. I have also reached out directly to "Liberty Vote", which is the new entity that has taken over the Dominion company, and asked for their assistance on this. But that was over 3 weeks ago, and they never responded to me at all.
- Third, some counties do not automatically count all the write-in votes, and instead will have the County's Election Board of Commissioners make a decision about each write-in vote, to decide whether or not to allow each particular write-in vote to stand. For example, in Cumberland County, if the Board decides to allow a particular write-in vote to stand, then they will count it as a " qualified vote". However if they disallow it, then it does not appear in results at all; and even worse still, once they reject a particular ballot, they have no way to go back and look at those specific rejected votes or ballots, nor can they tell me what the reasons were for rejecting those ballots, nor can they even tell me the total number of how many ballots or votes that they had rejected! (Purportedly, the Dominion software keeps no record of this, and once a ballot is rejected, there is no way to track it).
- Fourth, at least in some counties (e.g. Cumberland County), entire ballots, as well as individual votes, could be rejected for a variety of reasons, and some of those are reasons do not even appear to be valid (e.g. as I was told by a senior official in Cumberland County, some reasons that the board might decide to reject either the entire ballot and/or specific write-in votes would include: A) if the write-in vote contained profanity; B) if the write-in vote appeared to be a fictitious name; and/or C) if the same candidate`s name was written in more than once on the same ballot).
When I asked that Cumberland County official as to the logic behind that last reason, she explained that it was because the same person can't possibly hold two offices at the same time, therefore if the same candidate`s name is written in more than once, then the Board will automatically reject the entire ballot! And she also explained that once rejected, they can't even go back and find that ballot, so they would have to go through every single ballot that they received in their County all over again just to find it - which of course they don't have the manpower to do. Thus in Cumberland County, I am credited with only a single "qualified vote", and there appears to be no way to find out how many other votes I got that were rejected. So Cumberland County's method of doing things appears to be unique, as well as just plain wrong.
For example, while I can understand wanting to protect the public from profanity, if that's in fact what a voter had written in, then it should be visible no matter what, at least in some sense. That is, even still, they instead could choose to simply just redact it (e.g. if a person wrote in the 4-letter "F word", they could then publish in their report that there was a write-in vote for "F**k"). That would still be much better than simply not counting the vote at all, and/or rejecting that ballot entirely. Moreover, there's no valid reason to reject fictitious names, as for many decades people routinely voted for "Mickey Mouse" (and for more than one position); and further I believe that in fact it is a violation of the voter's right to have their votes heard.
Further still, and perhaps most significantly of all, even assuming if her point is true that the same person is not allowed to hold two offices at the same time, that doesn't mean that one person cannot receive votes for multiple offices. And in fact, in many other counties, the same exact names (some real, some ficitious) were written in for multiple offices (e.g. Barack Obama, Chris Christie, Mickey Mouse, Jesus, God, etc.) . So all around, Cumberland County's method of doing things appears to be just plain wrong.
- Fifth, it seems unequivocal that Cumberland County is not alone and its flawed method, as it clearly appears to have taken place in my own County, which is Ocean County. That is, on Tuesday November 4th, I visited my local voting place in Barnegat New Jersey, where I voted for myself, and where I had typed in my own name for every single office (i.e. not just for Governor). For one of the offices, I included the single quote character as the "apostrophe" when I typed in my name, because I wanted to test out the information I was told about apostrophes no longer causing glitches in the voting software (i.e. as a former computer programmer / web developer, I am well aware of the potential issues that have existed for decades, which can arise when a person enters a name that contains an apostrophe - that is, since most people will use the single quote key for the apostrophe character, if that single quote character is not handled properly, the software can confuse that single quote to operate as a "string delimiter" / "string boundary", and potentially crash the software, or prevent it from running properly). But yet when I finally was able to find the list of write-in names for Ocean County (i.e. this information was available on the Ocean County website but located in a very obscured spot, which I was not able to find without the help of an Ocean County election official, who gave me step by step instructions on how to navigate their website to find it), to my horror I saw that I was not credited with a single vote - not even in my town of Barnegat, where I had voted for myself for each and every office!!!
And it does not appear to be amongst the reasons for rejection that were listed by the Cumberland County official, as I note there was the same individual in Barnegat (someone by the name of "VARIAN W. HERBERT") who voted for himself, for 4 different offices , where he was credited with one vote for each office that he had written in his own name for. To see this for yourself, click here to download the official report from Ocean County, and then go to page 926. So the only two possible conclusions that I can draw are either that: A) the Ocean County Board decided to play favorites and only allowed certain individuals the ability to vote for themselves more than once; or B) the software glitch has not been fixed, and because I entered an apostrophe (as a single quote) in one of the write-in boxes, it then caused the Dominion software to get jammed up, and as a result it didn't count anything with my ballot (it would have been bad enough if had only affected the 1 vote where I had included the apostrophe in my name, but here my entire ballot was lost).
And as best I can tell, the Dominion software does not even generate an error log that the county can parse through to determine which ballots had experienced any software glitches that prevented it from recording those votes / ballots. And is not even clear as to where the voter data is actually stored - despite my asking a bunch of individuals in several different counties, it is still unknown to me (or them) if the voter data is stored locally on the counties' computers/ servers, and/or if the voter data is stored somewhere in the cloud, and/or if the voter data is stored on Dominion`s servers.
I really don't know what to do about this, but I am trying to speak to an election attorney that's willing to help me. I simply want to find out all the votes that I had received, from all of the people across the state who had given me a vote. I will keep you posted. Thank you for your attention and for reading all of this.
Sincerely,
Steven D'Agostino
