Our team at EPEC monitored the Election Night Reporting (ENR) data feed published by the VA Department of Elections (ELECT) during the 2024 General election. While we have not finished collecting or examining the election results, we have observed a few issues already that are presented below. (Note there is a TON more data analysis to do … these are just preliminary observations.)
There were three specific issues that we have noticed so far in our analysis of the ENR from ELECT. None of these issues look to have impacted the count, as far as we can tell, but these are system or procedural issues that should be documented, addressed and corrected going forward. We will continue to update on these issues as we find out more.
1. There was a distinct jump, and then immediate reversion, in 11 localities at 12am on Nov 6 in the ENR data feed. Bland County, Cambell County, Carrol county, Cumberland County, Dinwiddie County, Floyd County, Franklin City, Norfolk City, Nottaway County, Orange County and Rappahannock County all show the same “glitch”. The image galleries below show this “glitch” in the data feed all occurring at midnight. We have not (yet) reached out directly to ELECT or any of these counties yet to inquire as to the reason. We will update the blog if we find out anything as to the cause of this “glitch”.
2. The second issue we noticed was that Orange County had the first report of their totals at 10:10pm Nov 5 and initially reported the election day count for Donald Trump (7,891) and Kamala Harris (3,852). Then the data feed immediately removed the election day count information and began reporting the just the Early Voting and Mailed Absentee numbers (5,593 Trump, 4,259 Harris), only to add the same Election Day totals back in to the data feed at 9:06am Nov6.
3. Another interesting thing our team observed is that there were significant issues with the reliability public feed provided by VA ELECT over the course of the vote counting. Multiple team members were monitoring the feed from different locations around the state, and therefore had different endpoint internet connection configurations, yet we all noticed that the feed would routinely produce incorrectly formatted JSON data that could not be parsed by standard tools.
The errors seemed random and did not have a specific repeatable pattern when we tried to look at the data being returned. Sometimes it was simply a missing bracket, or quotation mark. Other times it appeared to be missing or malformed sections of the data. Python, MATLAB, Tableau and other standard JSON parser libraries were unable to parse these errant data files.
This might be an issue with IT infrastructure of bandwidth issues at ELECT causing dropped data packets? Or possibly an error in the server-side systems that respond to GET requests for the data? We do know that within the last few years, ELECT has partnered with “Enhanced Voting” to supply the ENR data feed. We hope this feedback is useful to help ELECT improve their ability to supply the public with reliable Election Night Reporting, and are happy to work with ELECT to help identify and correct these issues.