Monroe County to release Nov. 5 election results to public same as before, maybe with in-house GIS team
After more than three weeks of wrangling about how to display local election tallies to the public on election night, Monroe County’s election board decided Tuesday on a mostly business-as-usual approach.
Left out of the mix is An Island, LLC, a Tell City company that Monroe County clerk Nicole Browne had wanted to start using as a vendor.
The initial proposal from An Island, to display election results for three years, was $41,000, which was dropped to $30,000 later in the negotiations.
But the price is now a moot point, because the election board, which includes Browne, voted unanimously to adopt an approach to announcing local tallies that is basically the same as before.
What could be different is the potential inclusion of a .csv file, which contains machine-readable, structured data.
The election board’s decision to adopt a specific path forward followed two votes by the board of county commissioners against a contract with An Island (Sept. 25 and Oct. 9) and one vote by the election board against such a contract (on Oct. 10 ).
Winning unanimous support on Tuesday from the three-member election board was a resolution
that delegates to the clerk the election board’s duty to report unofficial election results to the state.
As county clerk, Browne serves on the election board, along with two party designees, John Fernandez (Democratic Party) and Judith Benckart (Republican). Browned voted in support of the resolution.
The reporting of the initial election tallies to the state is one place where a .csv file might be introduced for the first time in the procedures that Monroe County uses on election night. In the past, reporting to the state has been done by hand-keying the numbers.
Tuesday’s resolution also describes a delegation of authority to the clerk for disseminating unofficial results to county residents. That’s another place where a .csv file could be added to the process.
The .csv file would be included as an attachment to an email message sent by the clerk to a distribution list that includes media and party chairs. It’s a message that has traditionally included as an attachment a report in .pdf format.
Finally, the board’s resolution allows for a work group to reach a determination of some alternative approach, besides an email distribution list, which would involve displaying the results on the county’s GIS website. The GIS team works out of the surveyor’s office.
At Tuesday’s meeting, board president John Fernandez said he imagined the membership of the work group would include someone from the election office, a member from the GIS team, someone from the election board and a designee from each of the two major party chairs.
When she earlier pushed for use of a third-party vendor, Browne said she had concerns about the security of the Monroe County government computer network, after an early-July cyberattack shut down the county government for a week.
But the Hart Intercivic voting equipment that does the tally of the numbers is not ever connected to the county’s network. To hand off information from the Hart equipment to any other device requires transfer with a USB drive, whether it’s a .pdf file or a .csv file.
On Tuesday, Fernandez described the situation as a choice between the framework that An Island has built, ready to receive a .csv file, and the framework that the county’s GIS team has already built, to which a .csv file could also be uploaded. The county GIS framework currently displays voter turnout data, mapped out by precinct.
The possibility of exporting a .csv results file from a Hart Intercivic machine to a thumbdrive, was confirmed in an email sent to county officials by Bob White, with B&L IT services. White’s company is a contractor the county uses for logistics and technical support in connection with elections.
The immediate focus for the use of the .csv file has been for displaying Monroe County’s election results for residents, media, and party officials.
But the .csv file could also be used on election night to submit Monroe County election tallies to Indiana’s SVRS (statewide voter registration system), where the results would be displayed along with the results from all of Indiana’s 92 counties.
Historically, Monroe County’s results have been submitted to SVRS by hand-keying them into the computer. But the state election administrator’s handbook indicates the possibility of uploading results from an electronic file, by describing the required security features of any USB drive that is used for that purpose.
Monroe County election supervisor Kyle Farris told The B Square that the training provided by Civix, a state contractor, was to handkey the results into SVRS.
Reached by The B Square, White said that for the 2024 primary election, he had tried uploading a .csv results file to SVRS, but it had been rejected—because Monroe County had not notified SVRS administrators that it would be submitting results with that method. With the appropriate request to SVRS, ahead of election night, White indicated that uploading the .csv file to SVRS should be possible.
