Why Was D.C. Slow to Report Results on Election Night?

The pledge was simple enough: Once the polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, the District of Columbia Board of Elections would quickly post the results online. Election night parties could proceed, reporters could file their stories and residents could go to bed having some sense of the consequential election they just voted in.

But that didn’t happen.

“It is nearly 90 minutes after polls closed in the nation’s capital, and there’s still zero votes counted in the Washington, D.C., mayoral primary,” noted New York Times reporter Reid Epstein. “Alabama’s polls closed at the same time, and more than 165,000 votes have been counted in the state Senate’s primaries.”

Epstein — and just about everyone else waiting on results, NOTUS reporters included — would have to wait almost another 90 minutes before initial counts were posted, at 10:47 p.m. The wait dragged on to such an extent that one top mayoral candidate — Kenyan McDuffie — spoke to supporters before any results had been made public to tell them what was becoming apparent to everyone else: “It’s going to be a while.”

Gary Thompson, the chair of the elections board, says the reason for the delays is simple: There were still D.C. residents waiting to vote when polls were set to close, so election workers did what they always do and waited for them to do so. And as long as they waited, no results would be released.

“The most important thing is the voter,” he told NOTUS. “I would rather have some in the media be annoyed than stop the voters from thinking clearly about who they want to vote for.”

But why were there lines outside some polling places? There’s a more complicated explanation, and it involves a new way of voting, old machines to vote on and a tug-of-war between apolitical election officials and the D.C. lawmakers who oversee and fund them.

‘This Is a Fiasco’

On Tuesday, residents could vote at any of the 75 vote centers located across the city. Gone are the days of being tied to a specific polling place based on your residential address; now any voter can get a ballot on demand at any vote center for the specific races they’ll be weighing in on. And that ballot can be on paper — which is printed on the spot — or on an electronic machine, which is preloaded with all the possible ballot combinations for any given election.

By late afternoon on Tuesday, though, some vote centers were experiencing problems with their ballot printers, with some running out of ink. A NOTUS reporter was on hand at Powell Elementary in Petworth when a printer stopped working, forcing voters to use the three available electronic voting machines.

“This is a fiasco,” remarked a frustrated election worker, who asked not to be named, as the line quickly grew. The same problem was reported at Bancroft Elementary in Mount Pleasant, at Shiloh Baptist Church in Shaw and at Noyes Elementary in Brookland.

In some cases the printers were quickly fitted with new ink cartridges; in others, though, long lines developed as voters waited to cast ballots on the electronic voting machines. And those machines were an additional source of the problem; one voter in Ward 5 said they were “slower than a 10-year-old iPad.”

And that was a problem D.C. lawmakers were aware of — and, election officials say, haven’t done anything to remedy.

During a D.C. Council budget hearing last month, Board of Elections Director Monica Evans explained the board needed a one-time allocation of $2.5 million, plus $90,000 in ongoing maintenance, to replace 450 aging “ExpressVote ADA ballot-marking devices.” She noted that the machines are 10 years old “and at the end of their useful life.”

She went on to explain that there have been increased problems with the touch screen and that it’s taking longer to mark choices — issues the board saw crop up in the 2024 election and were also evident in Tuesday evening’s long lines.

“The current machines have issues including unresponsive touch screens that frustrate voters and undermine confidence in the election process,” Evans testified. She said the vendor supplying the machines also told the board it was time to replace the equipment.

The shift to ranked-choice voting, Evans added, only exacerbated the problem by naturally causing voters to spend more time at the machines. In some cases that NOTUS reporters observed, voters could spend up to 20 or more minutes navigating through the many pages of the longer ballot on the electronic voting machines.

Ranked-choice voting caused voters to spend more time with their paper ballots and at the machines. Kainaz Amaria/NOTUS

Evans also warned of the broader implications: “Malfunctioning equipment also directly erodes public trust, especially as the BOE implements ranked-choice voting, which requires highly responsive and accurate ballot-marking devices.”

While elections officials acknowledged during the May hearing that it was already too late to deploy new equipment in time for the June primary, the aim was to secure funding and get new machines in place ahead of the general election, helping to maintain “the credibility of the District’s electoral process,” Evans said.

‘He’s Out of His Mind’

In an interview with NOTUS, Thompson said that the elections board has long been stymied by the Council in its requests for funding to replace outdated electronic voting machines. He said that’s especially the case with Council member Anita Bonds, who chairs the committee that oversees the elections board.

“She doesn’t understand our needs, she hasn’t been responsive to them. She’s been unhelpful for a while,” he said. “We threw up our hands and said we have to keep calm and carry on, do what we have to do. We’ll use these slightly outdated machines and we’re going to figure it out.”

For her part, Bonds called the primary night delays “upsetting,” but told NOTUS that she was under the impression the current machines, which are set to be replaced for the general election, could withstand one last citywide vote.

Janeese Lewis George supporters wait for her remarks late into Tuesday night at the Howard Theatre. Violet Jira/NOTUS

“But we were not expecting it to be nearly two hours,” Bonds said of some of the lines, noting she did not anticipate compounding equipment malfunctions like printers running out of ink.

As to Thompson’s accusation that she hadn’t supported his requests for funding and assistance, Bonds fired back directly: “He’s out of his mind,” she said, adding that the agency’s day-to-day staff would readily disagree with his assessment.

Alice Miller, a senior policy adviser and former executive director with the elections board, similarly disputed Thompson’s characterization of the Council member, adding that Bonds has “really tried to advocate to get us what we need.”

Beyond voting technology, though, Thompson also said that human nature may have played a role in the lines at polling places and delayed reporting of election results.

“I started going to vote centers yesterday morning and they were pretty empty and as the day went on, a lot of people left it until the last minute,” he said. (D.C. sent every registered voter a mail ballot in mid-May, and had a weeklong period of early voting before the primary election.)

While Tuesday’s delays have passed, there’s still more waiting to come: Tens of thousands of late-arriving mail ballots have yet to be counted, meaning that the first tabulation rounds under ranked-choice voting may not happen until this weekend.