Onondaga County residents will soon be able to see how their neighbors voted thanks to a new Results Caster system. Democratic Elections Commissioner Dustin Czarny says anyone can go to their website to see how individual districts reported on each race on Election Night. He demonstrates how to use the system using 2015 election data from the county executive race.
“What’s really neat about this is let’s say Toby Shelley in blue won out in Marcellus, how did that happen? You can click on it will zoom in and you can see Marcellus second district how that voted on election night,” Czarny said. “And you can click on any election district and see that. Onondaga ten, you can see right next door Joanie won 118 to 100.”
Czarny says election results are transferred to a computer at their main office via secure digital, or SD cards before being posted to their website that evening.
“We then after Election Day compare each SD card result that we put up on the web with the actual SD card that are left in the machine, that’s our routine audit that we do.” Czarny said. “So each machine, all 260 machines will be compared to make sure that the results we put out on election night are correct.”
With talk of rigged elections, Czarny assures voters that the machines are never connected to the internet and therefore, cannot be hacked.
“They would have to physically get into the machine.” Czarny says, “With 265 machines just in Onondaga county alone, and tens of thousands of machines in New York State, that will be a massive operation to try to do anything that would actually affect any real results.”
Onondaga County residents will go to the voting booth a week from today. To see how your district voted, visit ongov.net/elections on Election Night.
