The Washington Secretary of State’s official results website had a bad election night

Last night was pret­ty rough for results.vote.wa.gov, the offi­cial elec­tion results web­site main­tained by the Wash­ing­ton Sec­re­tary of State’s office.

With two hot-but­ton, con­tro­ver­sial mea­sures on the statewide bal­lot, a lot of Wash­ing­to­ni­ans were inter­est­ed in the ear­ly returns for Ini­tia­tive 976 and Ini­tia­tive 1000, con­cern­ing trans­porta­tion fund­ing and affir­ma­tive action, respectively.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the site was mal­func­tion­ing for much of the evening. It dis­played inac­cu­rate per­cent­ages for some coun­ties and no data at all for oth­ers, forc­ing reporters, activists, and observers to go direct­ly to coun­ty elec­tion web­sites to obtain data from PDFs or text files. This sit­u­a­tion per­sist­ed for hours.

By 1 AM this morn­ing, the prob­lems (or at least most of them) appeared to have been qui­et­ly resolved with­out an apol­o­gy or even a com­ment from Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman’s office. The coun­ty-by-coun­ty maps of the two statewide bal­lot mea­sures are now show­ing results data from all thir­ty-nine coun­ties, and the per­cent­ages appear to cor­re­spond to the actu­al vote totals.

NPI’s archiv­ing tools saved copies of the site while the errors were live.

As you can see from this screen­shot, tak­en from a copy of the site made at 8:05 PM, the per­cent­ages for Ini­tia­tive 976 in Pacif­ic Coun­ty are incorrect.

The Yes vote was shown as 22.73% and the No vote as 12.42%. The per­cent­ages should have read 64.66% for the yes side and 35.34% for the no side.

An hour lat­er, the per­cent­ages were still wrong.

Here’s a screen­shot tak­en from a copy of the results web­site made at 9:05 PM:

The yes vote in Pacif­ic Coun­ty on I‑976 by this point was being shown as 0.33% and the no vote as 0.18%… still incor­rect fig­ures. Again, the per­cent­ages should have read 64.66% for the yes side and 35.34% for the no side.

You can also see from that screen­shot that data from a num­ber of coun­ties is miss­ing. For exam­ple, by that point in the evening, Sno­homish Coun­ty had pub­lished its ini­tial returns, but they were not being aggre­gat­ed. That caused the topline fig­ures for the bal­lot mea­sures to unnec­es­sar­i­ly out of date and skewed.

In addi­tion, the time­stamp for the state as a whole read “Last updat­ed on 11/06/2019 5:00 PM”. As in today at 5 PM, about twen­ty hours in the future!

By 10:05 PM, Sno­homish’s ini­tial returns had been aggre­gat­ed in, but data from Clal­lam, Chelan, Okanogan, Lin­coln, and Franklin coun­ties had not been.

By mid­night, only Franklin’s data had been incorporated.

It was not until after mid­night that data from Clal­lam, Chelan, Okanogan, and Lin­coln coun­ties was final­ly incor­po­rat­ed into the results web­site — more than four hours after the first results had been post­ed for pub­lic consumption.

This is not the first time that results.vote.wa.gov has suf­fered from prob­lems and mishaps. But it needs to be the last. How can we have con­fi­dence in the data that the Sec­re­tary of State is pub­lish­ing if that data is incom­plete and error-ridden?

The data export func­tion­al­i­ty on results.vote.wa.gov also suf­fers from sev­er­al issues, name­ly a fail­ure to adhere to con­sis­tent stan­dards for the pre­sen­ta­tion of data. Juris­dic­tion names, can­di­date names, and con­test names do not fol­low a stan­dard for­mat, sig­nif­i­cant­ly com­pli­cat­ing poten­tial reuses of the data.

At NPI, we use the data export func­tion­al­i­ty on results.wa.gov to pow­er Pacif­ic NW Por­tal’s elec­tions engine. To make the engine go, NPI’s Oper­a­tions Direc­tor and chief tech­nol­o­gist Ren­nie Sawade rou­tine­ly has to write spe­cial code to com­pen­sate for all the prob­lems in the XML pub­lished by the Sec­re­tary of State.

If the source data was clean, con­sis­tent XML, that would­n’t be necessary.

Incum­bent Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman prides her­self on her elec­tions admin­is­tra­tion exper­tise, so hope­ful­ly she’s just as appalled about the prob­lems that I’ve described in this post as we are.

Wyman needs to act imme­di­ate­ly to rec­ti­fy these issues so that Wash­ing­ton’s elec­tion results web­site isn’t a mal­func­tion­ing embar­rass­ment next year.