Monmouth County's Recount Proves the Reliability of Electronic Voting Machines

On November 21, 2022, the Monday of Thanksgiving Week, the Monmouth Board of Canvassers met in their offices at 300 Halls Mill Road in Freehold, New Jersey, and certified the results of the November 8, 2022, General Election. That day, Jim Bean, a former Belmar councilman, sent an email to Sue Mcrae, an employee of the Superintendent of Elections, asking for information on voter turnout.

Specifically, Bean wanted to know how many people in Belmar had voted in the machines, how many voted early, how many by mail, and how many cast provisional ballots. Sue was on vacation until November 29, but when she returned, she forwarded Jim's email down the hall to the County Clerk's office which is responsible for releasing election results to the public.

The Superintendent of Elections maintains the list of registered voters. When a person goes to the polls and signs in, receives her or his voting authority and activation card, then casts a ballot, the fact that that person has voted is noted immediately on the voting list, so they can't vote twice.

On December 8, 2022, the State Board of Canvassers met in Trenton and certified the results, including Monmouth County, of all the races held in New Jersey in the General Election. State certification is considered the end of the election, and Certificates of Election are sent to the winning candidates, who are then sworn into office on New Year's Day.

By December 12, when Jim had still not received the requested information from the County Clerk, Sue sent him a list of all the people who had and the manner in which they voted in Belmar. Jim found that 1,589 had voted in the machines on Election Day, 286 voted early, 561 voted by mail, and 76 voted provisional, for a total of 2,512 votes.

In the Belmar Mayor's race, Mark Walsifer got 1,356 to Gerald Buccafusco's 1,467 for a total of 2,823 or 311 more than the total number of voters who had allegedly cast ballots. Jim asked where the additional 311 votes came from, which started an investigation of voting tabulation in Monmouth County.

That there were errors in the Monmouth County results should have been obvious to anyone who just eyeballed the returns. In Tinton Falls District 12, the turnout was listed as 92.14%, while the county-wide turnout in the off-year election was 47.27%. The outlier result in District 12 should have raised eyebrows, given that in the 2016 presidential contest, where the county-wide turnout was 71.91%, Tinton Falls District 12 had an 86.60% tunout. So, 92.14% in an off-year election is a sign of either voter fraud or a mistake in the report.

On January 11, 2023, after an investigation by Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the suppliers of voting equipment to the county, the Board became aware of a tabulation error in six of Monmouth County's 466 election districts. The some of the results from these six districts were uploaded twice to the County Clerk on Election Night. The tabulation error resulted in potentially changing the outcome of a school board race in Ocean Township, where Steven Clayton had defeated Jeffrey Weinstein by 20 votes - 3,523 to 3,503.

How Votes are Counted

Every election district has two voting machines, 932 in Monmouth County. Each machine has a flash drive on which the votes are recorded.

After the polls close at 8:00 p.m., the machines automatically print five copies of the results, each of which is signed by all of the poll workers who ran the election in that district. One copy is left in the polling place for public inspection. Election workers remove the flash drives from each machine and take them to one of the 53 municipal clerks to transmit the results to the County Clerk. This operation involves plugging the flash drive into a dedicated computer that automatically uploads the data from the flash drive to the Clerk for posting on Election Night. The drives are specially designed to work only with voting machines and dedicated computers. They can not be used for any other purpose. The election night results are unofficial, about 95% complete, as all provisional and some mail-in ballots remain to be received and processed.

Tabulation errors are sometimes allowed to remain in place if their correction doesn't change the results of an election. Also, challenges and recounts are expensive. In New Jersey, the law requires that a candidate request a recount. Then, only the race in question is recounted.

On January 23, 2023, Dominic Giova, Deputy Attorney General, filed an Order to Show Cause on behalf of the Monmouth County Board of Elections and the Superintendent of Elections for permission to recount the votes in the six election districts that had been determined to have errors in the results. The six election districts were in four towns: Belmar, Fair Haven, Ocean, and Tinton Falls. The four municipalities had a total of 53 candidates on the ballot: 11 congressional candidates, seven county candidates, four mayoral contenders, 12 council candidates, and 19 seeking seats on the local school boards. All the candidates were notified of the request to recount the votes. There were allegedly a total of 24,017 ballots cast in 48 districts on 96 machines on Election Night in the four towns.

To Recount or Not

At 9:00 a.m. on February 1, Judge David Bauman held a hearing in the Monmouth County Courthouse. He faced two big obstacles. The statute says that only a candidate can request a recount, and neither the Board of Elections nor the County Clerk was a candidate. The second problem was that Title 19 of the Election Law says that a challenge to the results must be filed within 17 days of the election, and Mr. Giova filed his petition 75 days after the election.

The first problem was solved when six candidates present at the hearing and online said that they would support the petition. Then the judge stated that it was difficult to overrule a clearly stated statute like the 17-day rule. Mr. Giova said, "This is a unique case, your honor." Judge Bauman replied, "All cases are unique." He did solve the problem by consulting case law to determine that deadlines in election controversies are directory, not mandatory, but to prevent his decision from being misused in the future and provide finality to the results of elections, he emphasized that no one was objecting to this late recount.

On February 2, 2023, Judge David Bauman handed down his decision allowing for the recount. He waived the normal fee for recounts, which is $25.00 per district. Recounts are not elections. They are legal proceedings conducted by the Board of Elections under the authority of the court. It was to begin on February 7 and continue until completed. The order of the court stipulated the order in which the towns would be recounted: Ocean, Belmar, Fair Haven, and Tinton Falls. The recounting would take place from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and perhaps a little later Monday through Friday. The judge ordered a hand-to-eye recount of all the ballots in all four towns, which was a gift. While most recounts just deal with a close race like the school board seat in Ocean Township, Bauman's order requiring the recounting of all the votes, including the paper trail of the machine votes, would permit an observer the unprecedented opportunity to see how people cast their secret ballots. It would also demonstrate the accuracy of the voting machines and tabulation technology.

Candidates are granted the special privilege of being allowed by statute to observe every part of the election process in which they are running. They can inspect the voting machines before they leave the warehouse. They can wander in and out of every polling place where they are on the ballot when access on Election Day is restricted only to poll workers, credentialed poll watchers, and voters in the district. People even lose their First Amendment rights within 100 feet of a polling location. An election is a serious business that requires calm and precision. Except for the Board of Election employees who carry out the recount, only candidates can sit quietly and watch them work. Absolute silence is required. No newspaper reporters or outsiders of any kind are permitted in the room. Even Board employees whose desks are in the room where the recount is taking place must occasionally be admonished to be silent. It is a third-class misdemeanor for the Board itself to give out any information about the recount results while it is still in progress. The only public notice is when the final recount tally is posted to the County Clerk's website.

The Recount

Three Hundred Halls Mill Road in Freehold, New Jersey, is a split-level industrial building between two highways without a house or apartment in sight. It sits on the corner of Willow Brook Road, half a mile from a Motor Vehicle Division Office and Testing Center, surrounded on two sides by large asphalt parking lots, one of which is mainly filled with official county vehicles. As the building includes the voting machine warehouse in addition to the Elections Clerk, Superintendent of Elections, and Board of Elections, the location seems appropriate, but for the fact that it is completely inaccessible by public transportation.

Like many industrial buildings, it contains a gray stone-faced one-story office wing in the front with an entrance for the public, a counter, and windows. Behind is a three-story yellow-olive steel-clad, almost windowless building holding the warehouse and offices where the paperwork and logistics of running elections takes place. These offices are not open to the public, and people are only allowed in on a need-to-know basis. Even though Sue Macrae has worked for the Commissioner of Registration since 1976, she has never attended a recount, all of which take place a one-minute walk down a corridor behind her office and then up two flights of stairs.

It takes eight people to count a ballot and record the votes. The counting table is "T" shaped, one long fold-out table with a smaller one perpendicular to the first. The person who reads the ballot sits at the bottom of the "T." She has a helper. On the right and left sides of the T stem are the talliers, by law, a Republican and a Democrat. They each have helpers. And then, because the positions need to be rotated every hour or two to keep everyone fresh, two people sit at the top of the "T" opposite the reader.

The talliers have huge tally sheets, which are just large graph papers, with each block big enough for four verticle hash marks and one diagonal. There are five rows of twenty blocks, or 100 squares, for the number of ballots and four rows, or 80 blocks, for each of the candidates. One person in each pair does the tallying while the partner checks to make sure the scribe has put the correct number of dashes into the correct box.

Then the reader starts: "One ballot." The talliers put a hash mark in the first box for ballots. Then the reader says, "House of Representatives." The name of the office is mentioned every time. Then the name of the candidate selected on the ballot - Christopher Smith, Matthew Jenkins, David Schmidt, Hank Schroeder, Pam Daniels, or Jason Cullen plus write-ins. Next comes the Sheriff's race with the choice of Larry Luttrell, Shaun Golden, or Joshua Leinsdorf. Then comes County Commissioners, mayors, council candidates, if any, and the school board.

So a transcript of a ballot reading would go like this: "One ballot. House of Representatives - Chris, Sheriff - Shaun, County Commissioner - Tom, Kristal, Mayor - Mark, Council - Steve, Brian, School Board - Kurt, Amy, Helena." When finished, the reader hands the ballot to her helper, who puts it face down on the table, starting a neat pile that will keep the ballots in the order in which they were read. The reader resumes "One ballot. House of Representatives - Matthew, Sheriff - Larry, County Commissioner - Tom, Nick," and so on, with the scribes putting a mark in the appropriate box opposite the candidate's name.

After every five ballots or five votes for any candidate, the scribes say, "Tally." If one says tally, but the other doesn't, then everyone stops until the discrepancy is resolved. The count can also be stopped because of a question about the validity of a vote. Sometimes people casting votes by mail paper ballots will fill in the wrong oval, cross it out, and fill in the correct one. Then two commissioners, one Republican and one Democrat are called over to examine the ballot and decide whether the choice is valid. Sometimes voters use ink markers instead of pencils to fill in the oval, and the ink leaks through to the other side of the page and might be read or misread by the scanner. Dealing with such issues takes time.

Write-in votes also slow down the count. Every write-in vote is counted with the reader spelling out the name - A-L-E-X-A-N-D-R-A A-B-D-E-L-A-Z-I-Z, Alexandra Abdelaziz. Then there are phrases. The reader says: "Write-in, phrase. Asbury Park Transformative Justice." And then there are completely blank ballots. With the old Shoup mechancial voting machines, which were designed to be too big and heavy to steal, like a safe, one had to cast at least one vote for one candidate or issue for the machine to tally the ballot. Otherwise, the number of ballots cast wouldn't match the number of voting authorities issued.

When everything is going smoothly, a good crew can count 90 ballots per hour, depending on the number of races. People who say that everyone should vote on paper ballots that are hand counted have no concept of the work required. At 90 ballots per hour, the 155 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election would require 43,000 40-hour weeks of work by eight people or 344,000 person-weeks of work. At $15 per hour, which is probably too little to get helpers of the quality needed for such exacting work, it would have cost $200 million (or $1.29 per vote) to hand count the 2020 presidential election. Recounting the 24,000 ballots in Monmouth County took 32 people nine days.

The ES&S DS950 high-speed scanner and tabulator can count 280 ballots per minute. That's one machine counting 186 times faster than eight people and costs $327,000 including maintenance and training.

Even candidates who are allowed to witness the count are not allowed to look at the tally sheets. After every 500 ballots, when the sheets are full, the workers tally the totals for all candidates and take a break. The sheets are ceremoniously taken into a room with a "No Cellphones Allowed Beyond This Point" sign on the door. If a candidate asks to see a tally sheet, he is shown a blank which is then destroyed.

When the recount of Ocean Township's 22 election districts and 10,009 votes was finished after the first three days, it turned out that Jeff Weinstein, who lost by 20 on Election Night, defeated Steven Clayton by four votes. In the original results, Clayton got 3,523 (17.00%) to Weinstein's 3,503 (16.91%). During the recount, Clayton lost 119 votes, while Weinstein lost only 95. While Clayton received 17.00% in the original count, he lost 19.29% of the votes lost in the recount. Weinstein, on the other hand, received 16.91% of the original votes but lost only 15.40% of the votes lost in the recount. This 3.89% difference in the 617 votes that were mistakenly added to the election night tally was enough to turn a 20-vote victory into a four-vote deficit.

The mistake in the election night tally was caused by human error, the failure of the person who was setting up the machines in July to include the software that prevented results from being uploaded more than once. When no human error is involved, overturning election results is exceedingly rare and only happens when the margin is in single or very low digits.

The reason for this is that the votes being recounted mirror, almost exactly, the distribution of the votes in the first instance. In most recounts with random errors, the winner will gain a few votes in a recount, and the loser will lose some.

Registered	Jeffrey Weinstein	Kurt Dzibela	Amy McGovern	Helena Peppe	Grace Talarico	Steven Clayton	Write-in	Total Votes
Total	3,503	2,372	4,470	2,995	3,788	3,523	70	20,721
Percentage	16.91%	11.45%	21.57%	14.45%	18.28%	17.00%	0.34%
Recount	3,408	2,299	4,327	2,918	3,680	3,404	68	20,104
Difference	-95	-73	-143	-77	-108	-119	-2	-617
Differnce %	15.40%	11.83%	23.18%	12.48%	17.50%	19.29%	0.32%

In Fair Haven, for example, Congressman Frank Pallone edged out Sue Kiley 1,673 to 1,580 on Election night, a 93 vote margin. In the recount, Pallone lost 159 and Kiley lost 150 to leave Pallone with a margin of 84. Pallone got 50.76% on election night and 50.81% in the recount. Kiley got 47.94% on election night and 47.99% in the recount. Both gained in percentage because Tara Fisher, an independent, lost six of her 36 votes, falling from 1.09% on election night to 1.01% in the recount and Eric Antisell lost one of his five votes. The net result of the recount in Fair Haven was 0.10% of the votes, with 0.05% going to Pallone and 0.05% going to Kiley. The changed vote percentages mirror almost exactly the vote totals. Although only 316 votes changed, 47.47% came from Kiley who got 47.94% on Election Night, 50.32% came from Pallone, who 50.76% on Election Night. The difference between Pallone and Kiley on Election night was 2.82%. The difference between Pallone and Kiley in the 316 recounted votes was 2.85%.

Fair Haven CD 6	Original	Recount	Change	Original %	Recount%	Change%	Result Change
Susan M. Kiley	1,580	1,430	(150)	47.94%	47.99%	0.05%	47.47%
Frank Pallone, Jr.	1,673	1,514	(159)	50.76%	50.81%	0.05%	50.32%
Tara Fisher	36	30	(6)	1.09%	1.01%	-0.09%	-1.18%
Inder Jit Soni	1	1	-	0.03%	0.03%	0.00%	0.00%
Eric Antisell	5	4	(1)	0.15%	0.12%	-0.03%	0.32%
Write-in	1	1	-	0.03%	0.03%	0.00%	0.00%
Total	3,296	2,980	(316)	100.00%			(0.05)

Election contests have an internal consistency. They are fractals. When people say, look, we're only losing by 120 votes, let's have a recount. First of all, recounts cost money. Secondly, they rarely result in changing the outcome because any little portion of the resuts most likely will be almost proportional to the whole.

Even though Republican Representative Chris Smith lost many more votes than Matthew Jenkins in Belmar, it barely moved the needle in the final result. Smith lost 0.37% while Jenkins gained 0.46%, but all that did was push Smith's 56.94% Election Night result down to 56.56%, still considered a landslide. Smith lost more votes in the recount because he had more votes to lose.

Belmar Congress	Original	Recount	Change	Original %	Recount%	Change %	Result Change
Christopher Smith	1,592	1,452	(140)	56.94%	56.56%	61.14%	-0.37%
Matthew Jenkins	1,109	1,030	(79)	39.66%	40.12%	34.50%	0.46%
David Schmidt	33	30	(3)	1.18%	1.17%	1.31%	-0.01%
Hank Schroeder	22	20	(2)	0.79%	0.78%	0.87%	-0.01%
Pam Daniels	7	7	-	0.25%	0.27%	0.00%	0.02%
Jason Cullen	33	28	(5)	1.18%	1.09%	2.18%	-0.09%
Write-in	-	-	-
	2,796	2,567	(229)			100.00%

The pattern is the same in Ocean Township. Although Smith lost 82% more votes in the recount as Matthew Jenkins in a tight race, it made only a marginal difference in the final result. Smith's margin fell from 51.64% to 51.13% while Jenkins went up from 46.63% to 47.11%. Smith's margin went from 5.01% to 4.02%, not even close.

Ocean	Original	Recount	Change	Original %	Recount%	Change %	Result Change
Christopher Smith	5,102	4,851	(251)	51.64%	51.13%	63.87%	-0.51%
Matthew Jenkins	4,607	4,469	(138)	46.63%	47.11%	35.11%	0.48%
David Schmidt	57	58	1	0.58%	0.61%	-0.25%	0.03%
Hank Schroeder	14	14	-	0.14%	0.15%	0.00%	0.01%
Pam Daniels	19	19	-	0.19%	0.20%	0.00%	0.01%
Jason Cullen	70	67	(3)	0.71%	0.71%	0.76%	0.00%
Write-in	11	9	(2)	0.11%	0.09%	0.51%	-0.02%
	9,880	9,487	(393)			100.00%

In Tinton Falls, the error was obvious on Election Night. District 12 reported a turnout of 92.14%, impossibly high for an off-year election where the county was voting only 47%. Disitricts 11 and 12 are the Seabrook Village retirement communities. They consistently have the highest turnout of the districts in Tinton Falls. In 2018, the most recent off-year election, District 12's turnout was 73.75% when the county was voting 58%, more than 10% higher than in 2022.

Subtracting the 128 lost votes in the Tinton Falls turnout from the purported 539 who voted in District 12, yields 411 votes or 70.25% turnout, still the highest in Tinton Falls. In the case of Tinton Falls, it is clear from the outside that the mail-in ballots in District 12 were counted twice.

Smith's 494 vote margin fell to 468. Again a 50% higher change in the recount had only a minimal effect on the outcome, -0.13% for Smith versus +0.10% for Jenkins. Smith's 6.40% margin on Election Night was reduced to 6.17% in the recount, a swing of 0.23%.

Tinton Falls	Original	Recount	Change	Original %	Recount %	Change %	Result Change
Christopher Smith	4,037	3,960	-77	52.33%	52.20%	60.16%	-0.13%
Matthew Jenkins	3,543	3,492	-51	45.93%	46.03%	39.84%	0.10%
David Schmidt	44	45	1	0.57%	0.59%	-0.78%	0.02%
Hank Schroeder	7	7	0	0.09%	0.09%	0.00%	0.00%
Pam Daniels	19	19	0	0.25%	0.25%	0.00%	0.00%
Jason Cullen	58	59	1	0.75%	0.78%	0.76%	0.03%
Write-in	6	4	-2	0.08%	0.05%	1.56%	-0.03%
	7,714	7,586	-128			100.00%

Not until February 22, 2023 after the entire recount of all races had been completed, did Judge Bauman issue his order revoking the certificate of election to the Ocean Township School Board from Steve Clayton and issuing it to Jeffrey Weinstein. There were no other changes in the results.

A total of 1,066 votes were changed in the 24,000 that were recounted which is a huge percentage, but everyone knew they were votes that had been mistakenly uploaded twice. Furthermore, the source of the error was immediately identified. Even with the large number, because one side lost 618 and the other lost 427, the net change was only 191. So while the headline percentage of recounted votes was 4.4%, the effect was 0.8%.

Stealing Elections

The uniformity of election outcomes shows how difficult it is to find extra votes that change the outcome of an election during a recount. By comparison, in Colorado's Third Congressional District, Loren Bobert retained her House seat by 546 out of 327,132 ballots cast. As the margin was less than 0.5%, Colorado law required a recount. In the recount, Bobert lost three, and Frisch, her opponent, gained one. That's how good the voting machines and mechanical tabulators are when working correctly.

What I have tried to show is that hand-counting ballots is more inaccurate, time-consuming, and expensive than using machines. Candidates trying to steal elections is nothing new. That is the reason vote counting has gone from paper ballots counted by hand to machines.

In the bad old days, election workers would break off pencil leads under their fingernails and, as they opened the security envelopes of the paper ballots from districts they knew would vote against their preferred candidate, would deface the ballot inside. That's why the tabulator/scanner machines are now used to open envelopes.

The old Shoup machines were as big as safes to prevent the time-honored techniques of stealing or stuffing ballot boxes. When voting on the Shoup machines, voters depressed levers beside candidates' names. When they pulled back the handle to open the curtain and leave the booth, everyone could hear the counters crank one notch as the voter's choices were counted. Occasionally, gears might slip, and votes lost forever. At the close of the polls, the trap doors were opened, revealing the counters displaying the number of votes received by each candidate. It was 7:00, 8:00, or 9:00 at night after a long day starting at 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. The poll workers had to read off the numbers while another wrote them down. Under those circumstances, mistaking 3s for 8s or 6s was common. Some of the numbers were high. Shorter, elderly poll workers, their vision blurred by fatigue, had difficulty reading the numbers accurately. So errors in the hundreds or thousands were commonplace. These were the kinds of errors that the recount statutes were designed to correct. That is why election night results are unofficial, and it takes at least a week to get the final results at the county level.

Voting technology has moved ahead much faster than Election Laws. The errors that precipitated the Monmouth County recount were human, both the failure to notice the outlier result in Tinton Falls District 12 and the failure to upload the correct software onto some of the voting machines.

Elections today are not stolen at the ballot box as in times past. They are stolen before the election by officials not obeying the laws as to ballot placement of candidates or by letting favored people onto the ballot after the deadline. The media essentially edits the ballot by covering some candidates and issues while ignoring others. Denying voters the information they need to make an informed choice is the way most election outcomes are determined these days. James Madison, drafter of the First Amendment to the Constitution and Fourth President of the United States, said, "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives." People have been trying to steal elections since the first votes were cast. Of one thing people can rest assured. After more than 200 years, with computing power undreamed of by the founding fathers, votes are accurately counted.

The most effective way to steal elections today is through the courts. George W. Bush and the Supreme Court succeeded in putting the loser in the White House in 2000 by stopping the count and changing the rules after the voting. And Al Gore let them steal it. Unmentioned by the media is that Trump's attempt to remain in office was a replay of the techniques used by Bush in 2000. He sent a mob to the Capitol to try and stop the vote count just as the Republican congressional staffers and supporters converged on the Palm Beach Board of Elections to prevent the recount twenty years before. Trump wanted to get the election into the hands of the Supreme Court and get it to throw out the votes from Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona and declare him the winner, just as the Supreme Court had handed Bush the election in 2000.

The most important lesson of the Monmouth County recount is that elections are run from top to bottom by people. There is no technological fix either for or against honest elections. I once asked the manager of the voting warehouse in Freehold, "Can the voting machines be hacked?" He answered, "If I gave you the keys to my house, could you rob it?"

Elections are difficult because they have to accomplish two contradictory purposes. They have to ensure that people only vote once, and they have to ensure that the ballot remains secret. The tri-partite system of dividing election administration between three entities: the Board of Elections, which conducts the elections and runs the machines; the Commissioner of Registration, who controls access to the machines for voting; and the County Clerk, who determines whose names appear on the ballot worked out over the past two centuries have done a tolerably good job of ensuring that only people who are allowed to vote cast ballots and those ballots are honestly counted and reported.

There is no perfect system, but the Monmouth County 2023 recount shows that the one currently in place is pretty close.

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Contact: Joshua Leinsdorf