For very human reasons, election night results are “unofficial”

On election night in 2011, people went to bed thinking that the state Senate District 17 race was headed for a recount.

Republican challenger Bryce Reeves led Democratic Sen. Edd Houck by 86 votes. At stake was control of the 40-member state Senate. If Reeves’ margin held, the Senate would end up with a 20-20 tie.

The next day, election officials in Culpeper discovered a keying error. Suddenly, Reeves’ lead shot to 222 votes. Soon after, Houck conceded.

Elections can be messy. Keep that in mind tonight.

Optical scanners have automated the bulk of counting, but there’s plenty of room for human error in a process involving thousands of people who have been on their feet for the better part of 15 straight hours.

• People reading computer tapes can copy the wrong numbers into a tally sheet.
• They can mishear numbers phoned in from a precinct.
• They can transpose numbers.
• They can add an extra zero.
• They can, well, simply be human.

And that’s why results reported on election night can change – and not for obvious reasons like extraterrestrials aiming laser beams at election machines.

Most of these human errors are small. And they often occur in elections so lopsided that it doesn’t make a difference.

There are double-checks and triple checks designed to eventually catch these errors. Many are found the next day, when election officials have had a few hours of sleep.

Election officials are transparent about any changes in election results. All changes must be entered in an “Elections Change Log” posted on the Board of Elections website. The log records the locality, precinct, reason and user name of the person who entered the change. The logs continue until the official results are certified.

Here is a sample of morning-after entries from the November 2021 election:

But sometimes a small error does make a big difference. Here are some recent examples of small (and big) mistakes that happened with reporting election results:

1991 House District 58: Tim Lindstrom v. Peter Way

On election night, the race for an open seat in House District 58 appeared to be a tie between Republican Peter Way and Democratic challenger Tim Lindstrom. A day later, Greene County found a “math error” that gave Lindstrom a one-vote lead. The race went to a recount, which later resulted in a 7-vote victory for Way. The recount discovered the following errors that made the difference:

• Two paper ballots from Albemarle County had not been counted
• Some absentee ballots in Albemarle had been miscounted
• Another mistake in Greene County; this time a voting machine had been misread.

1996 U.S. Senate: Mark Warner v. John Warner

Democrat Mark Warner was in the middle of his concession speech when squeals of delight went up around the room. The Associated Press had just reported results from Fairfax County that appeared to nearly erase what had been a 100,000-vote cushion for Republican U.S. Sen. John Warner. “It looked quite possible that Mark would defeat John,” recalls political analyst Larry Sabato, who was doing live commentary on WWBT-TV when the confusion started. It turns out that the AP had transposed the results for the two Warners. When the error was fixed, John Warner was the clear winner.

2020 U.S. House: Nick Freitas v. Abigail Spanberger

On election night, Republican challenger Nick Freitas held a 1,350-vote margin against Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger. The next day, VPAP noticed a discrepancy between the number of absentee vote totals in Henrico County compared to the number of absentee ballots that the county had received. Alerted by a VPAP tweet, Henrico officials discovered that on election night they had not processed a memory stick containing 16,616 absentee votes. (The device was mislabeled “provisional ballots,” which are processed after Election Day.) The absentee votes were overwhelmingly for Spanberger, which was consistent with the absentee votes already tallied. The correction put her in the lead for good. The incident provoked an online frenzy of false accusations of voter fraud, which two years later pop up again from time to time.

Source: Virginia Department of Elections