Software glitch delays election results

By Erinn Callahan

The News staff writer

NEDERLAND — First, a misplaced flash drive and, later, a software glitch, delayed election results in Jefferson County by more than four hours on Tuesday.

Counting station manager Bruce Drury said that the county lost at least two hours due to an early voting station closing up and locking a flash disk in one of the polling machines.

Nearly an hour and a half later, the drive was located, but once the vote counters began uploading the data, a glitch in the software deleted information containing the number of registered voters in each precinct.

“We’re going to have to completely start again,” Drury said at the Mid County office building, located on Viterbo Road in Nederland.

After discussions with technical support from Election Systems and Software, the Omaha-based company that manufactured the county voting equipment, Drury said that vote counters began manually inputting the precinct voter registration numbers.

The early voting numbers were final just before 11 p.m. Next, Drury said, they would begin incorporating the rest of the data.

After the early votes had been tallied, Beaumont attorney Raquel West narrowly led Port Arthur attorney Stella Batiste-Morrison with 38.4 percent to Batiste-Morrison’s 32.2 percent in the Democratic primary for Layne Walker’s judgeship on the 252nd District Court. Port Arthur attorney Nathan “Buddy” Reynolds, Jr. trailed with 29.4 percent.

In the Democratic race for the County Court at Law No. 3 judgeship, Audwin Samuel led Terrence L. Holmes and Jimmy D. Hamm with 42.9 percent of the vote. Holmes had 37.8 percent, and Hamm had 19.4 percent.

Jamie Smith led the Democratic nominees for District Clerk with 51.5 percent. Stanley Hatcher and Rose Mitchell Chaisson earned 24.8 percent and 23.7 percent, respectively.

Incumbent Judge Tom Gillam was leading his challengers for Justice of the Peace Precinct 8 with 44.8 percent of early ballots. Kenneth W. Marks was in second place with 22 percent, and Dawn E. Polk followed with 19.7 percent. Antoine “Ton” Freeman and Don Ray Collins rounded out early voting with 10.9 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively.

Email: ecallahan@panews.com

Twitter: @ErinnPA