"Oops" isn't exactly what anyone wants to hear in a high-pressure environment of vote counting, but there it was Tuesday night. The big "oops."
LAFAYETTE — "Oops" isn't exactly what anyone wants to hear in a high-pressure environment of vote counting, but there it was Tuesday night. The big "oops."
A novice election employee inserted a card from a vote machine to tally the results on it. But the election employee ejected the card before the machine counted its votes, erasing all of the information on the card, Tippecanoe County Clerk Christa Coffey said about 12:15 a.m. Wednesday.
Meanwhile, crowds gathered and waited for election returns in the Tippecanoe Room at the County Building, frequently asking why it was taking so long to count the votes.
As Coffey talked with reporters about the mistake, it had been barely 45 minutes since the final results were published on a very late election night that followed a very long Election Day.
Fortunately, the card did not erase all of its information.
Election workers matched the card to a specific machine from which it was pulled, Coffey said. Then they located where in Tippecanoe County that machine was.
It was in Dayton, Coffey said.
This launched a mad dash to the Dayton Town Hall to find the machine, which they successfully did, she said.
The voting machine stored its data in a cache, and election workers successfully downloaded the voters' selection from this backup onto a card, Coffey said.
Then it was back to the County Building downtown to put that card into the reader — and not remove it until the machine finished its task.
Long story short: No votes were lost; everyone's vote was counted, and those waiting on election returns had to wait considerably longer for the final results.