New Jersey County Confirms Dominion Machine Malfunction: ‘No Voter Should Walk Away’

LANSING, MI - NOVEMBER 08: A person casts their vote in the 2022 midterm election on Elect
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Frances Martel

NORTH BERGEN, New Jersey – The clerk of Mercer County, New Jersey, confirmed on Tuesday morning that a voting machine malfunction had shut down machines throughout the county and professionals from the machines’ manufacturing company, Dominion, were working to resolve the issue.

At press time, machines are still down in the county, which contains the state’s capital, Trenton, and the Democrat academic hub of Princeton. Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello insisted in a statement on Tuesday morning that “no voter should walk away” and poll workers would help citizens file provisional ballots manually.

“Poll workers will be on hand to walk voters through the process,” the County’s official Facebook page said in a statement. “The board is working with Dominion, the machine maker, to resolve the issue.”

The Board of Elections has advised the county of issues with voting machines. Poll workers will be on hand to walk…

Posted by Mercer County, New Jersey on Tuesday, November 8, 2022

The local news outlet NJ.com reported that the error leading to the malfunction involved “a printing and scanning issue;” various reports online claimed that the ink used on the ballots was not readable through the machine, though Breitbart News could not independently verify this claim. Sollami Covello, the county clerk, described the problem as a “glitch with the Dominion scanners,” according to NJ.com.

“Voters can still vote by completing their ballots and placing them in the top of the scanning machine in the slot where the emergency ballots are placed,” she emphasized. “Everyone can vote manually, so rest assured no one will be disenfranchised.”

“We have Dominion and other IT professionals coming down to fix the problem. No voter should walk away,” Sollami Covello’s statement concluded.

News12NJ, another statewide local news outlet, described the situation as a “software issue.”

Trenton, the capital city, issued a similar alert urging voters to say on line and “fill out [a] provisional ballot.”

Mercer County typically votes Democrat as a unit due to the large size of the populations of Princeton and Trenton, though it is also largely suburban by area and contains pockets of Republican supporters. Leftist President Joe Biden handily won the county in the 2020 election. The majority of the county is represented in Congress by Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ); a smaller piece of the county falls into Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ)’s district.

Watson Coleman told voters through her Twitter account that the issue for voters revolved around the performance of ballot scanners.

“The county is working to fix the scanner problem right now but all voters should rest assured their votes ARE being counted,” the Congresswoman wrote.

Her challenger, Republican Darius Mayfield, called the situation “disgusting” in a statement on Twitter.

“If Democracy is on the ballot, you can’t even vote for it right now in Mercer,” Mayfield lamented. He also urged voters to demand provisional ballots, as the county officials had advised.

Early reports from Mercer County indication a chaotic situation for confused voters – and poll workers.

“There were some folks working there that didn’t know what was going on — not their fault,” Anthony Petracca, a voter, told NJ.com. “The machines weren’t working for whatever reason and the lines were just building. Nothing was happening. They were attempting to make some sort of phone calls but there was no answer.”

“It’s just a mess, nobody had an answer,” he said.

The situation is embarrassing for Sollami Covello, the county clerk, who personally vouched for the quality of the machines in an opinion article published in local outlet TapInto in late September. Sollami Covello insisted at the time that voting in Mercer County was “safer than ever” due to the use of advanced Dominion machine technology.

“We are among several of New Jersey’s leading Counties when it comes to election safety and efficiency,” Sollami Covello wrote. “As County Clerk, I advocated for a verifiable, auditable paper trail for our voters, and I’m very proud to announce that in 2021, Mercer County purchased optical scan voting machines that indeed, have this verified paper trail.”

“The machines purchased by Mercer County were the Dominion ICP machines and tabulators. They use advanced optical scanning technology,” her article explained. “This is considered to be the safest way to vote among voter safety experts because while computers may be hacked, paper cannot.”

“After you cast your vote on a paper ballot and you scan it into the tabulator, the vote is recorded both on computer and on paper. The paper is then dropped into a bin which can be accessed if there is a question about the outcome of the election,” she described.

Sollami Covello noted at the time that the county would be using a separate poll book backup system manufactured by the company Tenex.

“These highly advanced E-Poll books communicate with each other so that our poll workers will know if someone tries to vote twice, or if someone has already received a vote by mail ballot,” she wrote. “By having a verified, auditable paper trail for all election results, we can safeguard our democracy and election process. I believe the only way to strengthen our democracy is to make sure we can all participate in it, and that the people have trust in the voting results and process.”

Statewide, officials in Trenton insisted this weekend that they had prepared for potential hacking, foreign attacks, and other potential problems.

“We are confident that the controls, processes and contingencies we have in place will help ensure that we’ll have another safe and secure election cycle,” New Jersey chief information security officer Mike Geraghty told the radio station NJ 101.5 on Monday. Officials insisted to the station that “no specific or credible threats” existed against New Jersey’s voting system, but they had prepared in case of failure or attack.

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