Late Posting Preliminary Election Results

Pierce County was slow to post preliminary election results on Election Night due to poor pre-election planning and testing. Despite the fact that the Elections Department projected record turnout for this election, they did not test their software in advance to see if it would be able to handle the record volume.

On Election Night, they found out their computers had insufficient memory to efficiently run the preliminary results and there were capacity constraints on transferring files between machines. Now that computer memory has been expanded and the software constraints understood, the results are run in short amounts of time. Running a volume test before election night would have saved the stress of slow results.

While Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy was responsible for the late posting of preliminary results, she blamed Ranked Choice Voting for the slow results . McCarthy needs to take responsibility for not running a volume test of the software.