Monroe County board rejects contract for display of election night results on 2–1 vote
At Thursday’s noon meeting of Monroe County’s election board, the stage was set for resolving a lingering question of how local election results will be announced to the public on Nov. 5.
Elected county clerk Nicole Browne had on two occasions—first on Sept. 25 and again this Wednesday (Oct. 9)—asked the board of county commissioners to approve a contract with An Island, LLC to display Monroe County election night results on its US Elections Live website.
The idea is to extract a .csv file generated by the Hart Intercivic voting machines onto a flash drive, then upload the file to An Island’s website.
Both times, the commissioners voted 0–3 on the contract approval. They pointed to the fact that the county’s own GIS division could provide essentially the same function as An Island’s website, with no additional cost. The contract would cost $30,000 for three years—it was lowered from $41,000.
Commissioners also do not accept Browne’s contention that there are cyber security concerns for the county’s network that make An Island a preferable alternative.
On Thursday, the election board also voted 2–1 to reject such a contract with An Island, LLC. Dissenting on the rejection was Browne. The other two members of the board—John Fernandez (Democratic Party appointee) and Judith Benckart (Republican Party appointee)—voted against the contract.
But there’s still an outside chance that Browne, as an elected official, might have a path to get the contract approved—if the election board were to take action at its Oct. 15 meeting to delegate some or all of its statutory duties to the clerk.
Whatever happens, the numbers that matter—those that determine the winners and losers in elections—will get reported from Monroe County to the state government the same way as before. They’ll get hand-keyed from a .pdf report generated by Hart Intercivic voting machines into a form hosted on an Indiana Secretary of State’s office server.
In Monroe County, the current method of reporting election results to the public is for the county clerk, Nicole Browne, to send a message to a list of email addresses, with an attached .pdf report of the results.
At Thursday’s meeting, once Fernandez established that the Hart Intercivic voting equipment is not connected to the Monroe County computer network, and the data handoff would be made using a flash drive, he was satisfied that the actual voting data would be protected, and the data could safely be provided to the GIS division, or An Island, or any other party.
About providing the data to Monroe County government Fernandez put it like this: “That we’re somehow putting at risk the election data—I don’t understand how. That doesn’t compute, to me.” The actual voting data is held on a Hart Intercivic machine, and is not connected to the county network, Fernandez pointed out.
After all of the back-and-forth, Benckart said all of her questions had been answered, and made the motion to reject the contract.
Delegation of election board duty?
Besides the An Island, LLC contract, an item appeared on Thursday’s election board meeting agenda that involves potentially delegating the election board’s statutory duty, to canvass election results, to the county clerk.
Canvassing means the reconciling of ballots and reporting of unofficial results. The delegation of an election board duty is possible under state election law.
It matters whose statutory duty it is to report the unofficial results. If it becomes the clerk’s duty, by delegation from the election board, then Browne would like to use a new state law [HEA 1158] to sign the contract with An Island herself. The new law allows elected officials to sign agreements themselves, if it’s necessary for them to perform a constitutional or statutory duty.
At Thursday’s election board meeting, county election supervisor Kylie Farris told board members that the issue of delegation had come up at the previous day’s meeting of the county commissioners. Farris said that she and the clerk wanted to check to see if there had been some resolution approved in the past that delegated the duty of canvassing to the clerk.
County attorney Molly Turner-King told the board that she could not find any such resolution of
delegation. Turner-King continued, saying that even if there was a prior resolution of delegation, it was not a resolution approved by the election board with its current membership.
Turner-King added, “If this board would like to make that delegation, I’m happy to prepare a resolution accordingly.”
Fernandez got clarification from Turner-King that the board would be meeting anyway on Oct. 15, to approve the list of poll workers for Election Day. So a resolution delegating the canvassing duty could appear on the Oct. 15 election board meeting agenda.
Even if it does appear on the agenda, it seems unlikely to win support from Fernandez and Benckart, if the impact of the delegation were to allow Browne, on her own, to execute the contract with An Island, LLC.
After Thursday’s meeting, The B Square asked Browne if she intended to pursue the contract with An Island, if on Oct. 15 the election board were to delegate its canvassing duty to her. She told The B Square that it’s something she would have to discuss with the election supervisor (Kylie Farris), and the chief deputy clerk (Laura Wert).
Cybersecurity issues?
It was chief deputy clerk Laura Wert, who conveyed Browne’s concerns about the security of Monroe Count’s computer network at Wednesday’s (Oct. 9) meeting of the county commissioners. Browne did not attend that meeting.
Browne cites as the source of her security concerns an early-July cybersecurity breach that shut down county government for a week.
At the election board meeting, Browne had distributed a print out of the statement that that Wert read aloud, and summarized those concerns the current security of Monroe County’s network:
The professional guidance and best practices advice given to the Clerk, from both cybersecurity and election security experts, was to divorce anything connected to Monroe County elections from Monroe County Government technology. The Clerk had hoped to do this discreetly and respectfully and only disclose the disconnect should Monroe County face any issues as to the integrity or outcome of the election.
But at the election board meeting, Greg Crohn, the county’s chief technology officer, countered the clerk’s statement by saying he does not know which entities provided Browne with the advice to disconnect all election-related matters from the county’s network.
Whoever they are, Crohn told the clerk, “I encourage you to have them reach out to me, because I’d like to discuss why they made that recommendation, and if there’s changes we can make to change that opinion.”
Crohn continued, “In my discussions with CISA [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency], the FBI, the state police, the IOT [Indiana Office of Technology ], there’s nothing ever been brought to me in that context, or anything alluding to [a need to disconnect].”
About the various agencies he named, Crohn added, “Matter of fact, all their recommendations and things that they’ve gone through our systems have been very complimentary on how Monroe County has handled the breach, and how [the county] had their infrastructure set up, both prior and since, and the efforts that we’re making with them.”
In-house capabilities for displaying election results
Also weighing in at the election board meeting was elected county surveyor Trohn Enright-Randolph who oversees the county’s GIS division. He reprised some of the same points he’d made at the previous day’s meeting of the county commissioners.
Enright-Randolph supports the clerk’s ability as an elected official to chart the course of her own office. But he has also said that the GIS team has already been mobilized to post election data.
On Thursday, Enright-Randolph rejected the idea that the county’s GIS team is “competing” with An Island.
The GIS division’s capabilities were highlighted from the public mic at Thursday’s election board meeting, by Jason Funk who works in the county auditor’s office, but was speaking as a member of the public. Funk pointed to the historical voter turnout data for 2016 and 2020 that the GIS team has already mapped out on the county’s own network
At Thursday’s meeting Enright-Randolph noted that the election results data could be hosted either on the county’s network, on the Esri cloud, which is owned and operated by Esri, wich is a private company specializing in GIS technology. The county uses Esri’s ArcGIS software.
The county now publishes the regular food establishment inspection reports on a website that is hosted on the Esri cloud.
John Baeten, who is the GIS coordinator for the county, weighed in at Thursday’s meeting to provide an assurance about the kind of data that either the GIS division, or An Island, would be handling. The work would not involve “touching votes,” Baeten said, and would have no connection to the votes themselves.
Baten put it like this: “We’d be presenting the results and representing the results on a site—so there’s no connection to the voting data, it’s just the reported results from the office.”
