Ten minutes before midnight on election day, November 4, Danville Registrar Peggy Petty got the only numbers she was missing from the City of Danville precincts. Overall, the office was in pretty good shape. All the data had been entered for the 17 city wards—the only remaining job was to post the tallies from the 2,329 absentee ballots to the state’s database in order for 100 percent reporting.
“Everything [except the absentee information] was perfect,” says Petty, and triple checked.
Once data is entered into the system in registrar offices across the district, it is updated to the public website used by candidates and citizens alike to check the status of the election. Sometimes, however, the Virginia Election and Registration Information System, called VERIS, can have glitches.
“VERIS will frustrate you to no end,” says Petty. “When it works well, it works beautifully. When it decides that it wants to give you a fit, it will drive you insane.”
As her staff carefully entered the absentee tallies for the Fifth District Congressional Race between Virgil Goode and Tom Perriello—1,022 votes for Goode and 1,303 votes for Perriello, with four write-ins—Petty warned them that midnight was approaching.
“I walked by and said, ‘At midnight, you’ve got to watch out because it’ll change over and we’ll have to start listing a reason [for changes].’ She was desperately trying to get them in, and as soon as she hit ‘Transmit,’ apparently the clock struck 12. It’s called a ‘First Tuesday’ error on that system. The big red letters come out.”
It usually means you lost only what you just entered, says Petty. “I wish it was just that.” The worker was kicked off the site. When she managed to get back on, she found that the numbers were changed in eight of the 17 wards. When she tried to correct them, errors kept popping up that kicked her off the system.
“By 1am, we just gave up on it,” said Petty, who had been in the office since 4:30am on November 4. “It got to a point, there was just no way for us to accurately fix it all without being here all night. We knew we had to be back in the office at 7am. So after 21 or 22 hours in here, we decided that we had to go home and get three hours sleep before we come back. I would have laid down on the floor, but it’s kind of dirty and I didn’t have a pillow or a blanket.”
That system breakdown led to a false swing in the Fifth District race that netted 2,130 votes in Perriello’s direction. The Perriello camp at Gravity Lounge in Charlottesville was elated when the new figure popped up on Blackberries and computer screens. (Presumably, it was a rather shocking moment at Smith Mountain Lake where Goode and his supporters congregated.)
It didn’t take long for both sides to notice that the swing was odd. Petty fielded calls from Perriello aides at 1am and gave them the actual numbers. A Goode representative actually drove down to the Danville office at 1:15am to get those numbers.
“It was just really frustrating that the candidates were seeing it, and the public and the media, and there was nothing we could do about it,” says Petty. (Incidentally, this is all reassuring to me only because it means that I’m not a total idiot—before going home on election night, I wrote this post based on those faulty numbers, thinking they gave Perriello a good enough cushion to come out on top.)
Today, the tallies will further change as provisional ballots are counted. Though there aren’t many such ballots—23 in Danville, 80 in Albemarle, two in Appomattox—they are likely to determine this election, whose difference is currently measured not in thousands or hundreds but in tens of voters. Petty says that at least 12 such ballots will count in Danville.
As of this moment, Perriello leads Goode by 53 votes, a difference of 0.02 percent. The race will almost certainly see a recount that won’t be resolved until December.
