For several hours on election night, roughly between 9 p.m. and midnight, results were reported for only 78 of Proviso’s 85 districts.
Nick Shields, a spokesperson for the Cook County Clerk’s Office, told the Review, April 5, some voting machines at several polling locations were having trouble transmitting voting totals.
The precincts experiencing some trouble were: 62, 96, 13, 8, 24, 38, 40, 54, 3, and 60. Of the final seven non-reporting precincts, two were in Forest Park, two in Hillside, and one each in Maywood, Berkeley and Broadview.
Shields cautioned that this is not unusual and happens every election.
“We had a time tough getting a signal,” Shields said. “This is beyond commonplace. It happens throughout Cook County.”
To get around the issue, election officials physically drove machines to a building run by the Cook County Clerk, on the 4500 block of West Cermak Road in Chicago, to tabulate the results.
“We literally are driving votes to our warehouse.” Shields said.
The machines, Shields said, are about a decade old.
“Our election equipment has served us well for a decade, but our equipment has aged significantly,” Cook County Clerk David Orr said in a press release from February 2017. “The public, as well as our poll workers, deserve the best election equipment experience that address the technological and security issues of tomorrow to ensure the most seamless ballot casting process for each of our more than 1.5 million registered suburban Cook County voters.”
All of Proviso’s 85 precincts have now been tallied and reported.
