Just five days before polling stations opened, the State Elections Commission (CEE, in Spanish) had nearly 1,000 optical scanners used to cast ballots that had not undergone logic and accuracy testing, despite being slated as replacements for any that malfunctioned on the day of the general elections.

These tests, which ensure that the machines and other electoral equipment function correctly and accurately count the votes marked on the ballots, were conducted by CEE staff without the assistance of Dominion Voting Systems, the company that sold the equipment and had previously supported this task, according to an investigation by the Centro de Periodismo Investigativo (CPI).

Dominion stated that a day before the machines were to be sent to the voting precincts, the CEE requested the company’s support to conduct logic and accuracy tests on an additional 1,000 optical scanners. The first machines were shipped to the island municipalities off the East Coast, Vieques and Culebra, on Friday, November 1. The CEE requested Dominion’s assistance, but the company declined due to the short timeframe, as stated in written declarations to the CPI. In total, the CEE has 6,073 optical scanners.

“Our understanding is that the additional request was to extend support for pre-election logic and accuracy testing to add more “back up” machines to the available inventory, which was apart from and in addition to the number of machines cited in the submitted test plan (October 2024) for the November 5 General Election,” the company said.

The tests aim to verify that the machines are powered on, their batteries are charged, they accurately read voter marks, and that the data with the results is transmitted correctly.

One of the most common complaints from voters and poll workers on election day was precisely that the machines shut down, failed to read voting marks, and jammed the ballots, among other issues. These devices scan hand-marked ballots that are fed into the machine to cast the votes.

The CPI received over 2,468 complaints submitted by voters and poll via an online form, of which 51% reported that the machines at their polling station experienced these problems.

In the CPI’s online form, voters reported that, in addition to the limited number of machines, many repeatedly jammed, failed to read ballot marks correctly or shut down. A voter from Caguas recounted that election workers “hit the machine with their hand and shook it to see if it would work.”

In Dorado, a voter had to deposit their ballot in the box because “the machine was broken, and they told us to just throw the ballots directly into the cardboard box. It felt strange to throw my ballots into a trash can, basically, with the lid completely open, and I could see everyone’s votes,” they said.

This issue was also brought up by observers from the American Civil Liberties Union, Puerto Rico Chapter (ACLU-PR), and the Puerto Rico Bar Association (CAAPR, in Spanish), as noted in a preliminary report published days before the elections.

Barely an hour and a half into the general elections, the alternate president of the CEE, Jessika Padilla Rivera, had to call technical support staff to repair the optical scanners at a polling station in Saint John’s School, in Condado. The poll workers had requested a replacement more than an hour earlier. The issue couldn’t be resolved, so voters continued depositing ballots into the emergency compartment. The chief electoral officer arrived there with a group of international observers monitoring the elections.

Dominion did not disclose the number of machines included in the test plan presented to the Commission in October but assured that the 1,000 machines that the CEE added the day before they were to be sent out to precincts were not included. Neither the Commission nor the commissioners provided access to the plan.

Padilla Rivera did not respond to whether Dominion’s version is true. She also did not answer questions such as: Why weren’t these 1,000 machines included in the original election plan, as Dominion claims? What prompted the change to include the 1,000 machines? Why wait until almost the last day to conduct logic and accuracy tests on the 1,000 machines? Were these machines really used as replacements?

“Regarding everything related to Dominion, I will not respond quickly,” the judge limited herself to saying when approached by the CPI during the General Canvass. Padilla Rivera said she wanted to “evaluate the question” to respond “responsibly.” Written statements were requested, but she did not respond.

On November 5, at Saint John’s School, when one of the machines malfunctioned in front of the accompanying press during her tour, the alternate president reassured reporters that the electoral machines had been thoroughly maintained and that 100% had successfully passed logic and accuracy tests.

“Nothing is infallible,” she said. “Unfortunately, what can I explain? When the logic and accuracy test was done, it was working, and when it arrived at the polling station, any particular issue could not be addressed. We need to see exactly what’s happening with the machine and replace it,” Rivera Padilla said.

Different Versions

The electoral commissioner of Project Dignity (PD), Juan M. Frontera Suau, refuted Dominion’s version and assured that from the beginning, it was known that all the optical scanners the CEE had available would be used in the elections. He further confirmed that the commissioners had mutually agreed to defer the testing of backup machines until the end of the electoral process, reserving them as potential replacements for any malfunctioning units.

“The logic and accuracy tests were under Electoral Operations and [Edwin] Velázquez [election project manager]. But in the Commission, it was discussed that we should ensure that, first, the tests were conducted on the regular polling station machines and then on the reserve ones. It was always clear that all had to pass the tests before being available for use,” Frontera Suau said.

Frontera Suau said that the weekend before the elections, CEE staff tested 750 pending machines, not 1,000, as Dominion claims. The Commissioner said that just the week before election day, Dominion staff informed that they were withdrawing without completing the testing process on all machines.

“We have those machines and some reserve machines. This has been done since 2016 when they [Dominion] have been here. Suddenly, when that aggressive schedule had already been met, they gave notice that they were pulling their people out. When the reserve ones were still pending,” said the PD commissioner.

Meanwhile, Roberto Iván Aponte Berríos, electoral commissioner of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP), said that in the last days before the elections, Edwin Velázquez, who has managed several technological projects for the CEE, told the Commission that there were some “reserve machines that had not been worked on and needed to be worked on.”

Aponte said he did not know why the logic and accuracy tests were not conducted along with the rest of the machines, as it was most logical to test 100% to have the maximum available for the general elections.

He said that less than a week before the elections, the CEE administration informed them about “700 and something” machines that were yet to be tested due to the delay in the entire process before the start of the elections.

“From the beginning, one assumes that the 6,073 (machines) will be addressed with a plan to have them all ready on time. They should have been included in that original plan. On many occasions, the discussion of the machines has been handled by the president, I don’t know if by the Secretariat or OSIPE (Office of Information Systems and Electronic Processing), and in those cases, the other commissioners have not been warned or informed,” said Aponte Berríos.

For former CEE president Liza García, the election project manager and OSIPE were responsible for ensuring that the reserve machines were included in the test schedule. Velázquez is the project manager.

“One day, two days before (the election), is not reasonable for anyone because they know it will take more than a day to test and verify 1,000 machines and then place them in a case and go through quality control. It is evident that the logistics and schedule compliance problem has been, extremely, the number one challenge for the CEE. It has met very few deadlines,” García said.

The alternate electoral commissioner of the Popular Democratic Party (PPD, in Spanish) and the electoral commissioner of the Citizen Victory Movement (MVC, in Spanish), Gerardo “Toñito” Cruz and Lillian Aponte Dones, respectively, attributed the problems to the machines exceeding their useful life and not getting adequate maintenance. The PD Commissioner agreed.

The PIP electoral commissioner attributed the machine failures to not being charged on time or draining quickly.

The machines operate when connected to electricity. They have internal batteries that are supposed to last eight hours in case of a power outage, and external batteries should also be available, said Brunilda Narváez Meléndez, deputy director of Education and Training at the CEE, on September 27, during a demonstration of the results transmission process the agency conducted for the press.

That same day, the alternate president said the internal batteries of the machines that needed them had been replaced and “100% of the external batteries,” without specifying how many. She added that the machines “have their batteries renewed every three months” as part of their maintenance, and during the logic and accuracy process, the battery operation is rechecked.

“In January, the process must be opened to tender to any firm that wants to participate to see the best technology for the CEE to lease new machines in the short term to prevent the equipment from becoming obsolete. The machines have performed as much as they could. They need to be replaced,” opined the PIP electoral commissioner.

Logic and Accuracy Tests Started Late

The logic and accuracy tests on the ballot scanning devices were supposed to start on October 1, but they didn’t begin until the 20th of that month. The delay, according to Dominion, was because the CEE delayed delivering the file with the data configured in the machines, which allows them to interpret the marks on the ballots, tabulate them, and disclose the results; that is, the information that tells the machine how to read, count, and adjudicate the votes per ballot.

The director of OSIPE at the CEE, Eduardo Nieves Cartagena, explained to the CPI that on October 11, the CEE delivered the data file for configuration, but the process was further delayed because Dominion made errors in configuring the vote adjudication for municipal legislators on the municipal ballot. There were five ballots in this election. One of them, the presidential preference ballot, was a local voting exercise with no actual consequence in the US elections.  

As for the count of Domicile Vote and voting in prisons, which occurred before November 5, the machines had problems interpreting the marks, so the CEE had to recommend that voters darken the entire box instead of making an “X.” Even so, a frequent complaint from voters and poll workers on election day was that the machines did not read some marks, and the process had to be attempted several times. Meanwhile, there were dozens of polling stations where party officials could not transmit the results and had to perform this task from the local Permanent Registration Boards.

Dominion had to update the configuration and restart the tests on all machines on October 24. To rectify the error, they brought in extra staff, the company said in written statements to the CPI. They also brought more machines, according to electoral commissioners and Nieves Cartagena.

Frontera Suau said that “the process with Dominion was extremely rushed.”

“There were several errors. The first was with the presidential preference ballot, which was delayed about a week, then the configuration of the municipal ballot, and then there was another problem with the transmission configuration that was not done correctly. There were three delays,” noted the PD electoral commissioner, holding Dominion responsible.

To perform this configuration, which is part of an “electoral security” process, Dominion needs the CEE to provide the final information on the number and type of ballots, total eligible voters, number of records, and total polling stations, among others. This involves waiting for the closure of the Electoral Register.

Delivering that file to Dominion was delayed due to the additional days given to voters whose transactions were pending due to problems with the Electronic Register of Voters. The last day for transactions and registrations was September 21, but the Electoral Register finally closed on October 5.

“There are some things that are obvious and that I have had for months, but [it was necessary] to close the Register. I needed to know exactly how many polling stations I would have throughout Puerto Rico to close the project. I don’t know the polling stations I need until I have the eligible voters, and I don’t have the eligible voters until I close the Register,” Velázquez, the project manager, told the CPI.

“In 2016 [when the machines debuted], we had no problems. Dominion was very willing to cooperate. In this [election], I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if they were upset. We didn’t give them a meeting because we believed it wasn’t prudent to discuss a contract now. I didn’t see Dominion’s willingness to mitigate the situations they created because it was them, not the CEE,” said the electoral commissioner of the New Progressive Party (PNP), Aníbal Vega Borges..

Problems With Ballot Scanning Device Recur

The 31 volunteers from the ACLU and the Bar Association, deployed in 40 electoral units across 12 municipalities, observed machines whose batteries were insufficiently charged. In others, the machines returned the ballot, the ballots jammed, counted the ballots twice, did not accept the ballots, or did not adjudicate the vote.

“In cases where malfunctioning optical scanning machines were observed, it was confirmed that there were no replacement machines available at the voting centers. In these cases, the procedure was to notify the CEE about the deficient machine and request a replacement. In one observed case, the replacement machine arrived at 4:16 p.m., less than an hour before the electoral unit closed. In another case, a third replacement machine had to be requested because the first two machines were defective,” reads part of the preliminary report by the ACLU and CAAPR electoral observers.

As in many voting centers, the University of Puerto Rico High School was a vivid example of the long lines that lasted hours for voters to cast their ballots. There, some of the optical scanners shut down, and poll workers had to turn them on and wait to resume their use, the CPI confirmed.

In Arecibo, at María Cadilla de Martínez School located in the Hato Arriba neighborhood and Luis A. Ferré Aguayo School in the Second Unit of the Sábana Hoyos neighborhood, some machines did not work or had problems. In the first school, two machines were damaged, but one of them was repaired by poll workers. In the second school, a machine broke down, and a technician had to be called in.

Machines Had Problems Before November 5

The optical scanners had issues during the PNP and PPD primaries last June. During that event, they took their time to read the ballots, chewed them up, or rejected them more than once, as the CPI observed in several polling stations. Additionally, a programming error caused discrepancies in the transmission of results. Dominion took responsibility for that error.

At that time, the then PNP commissioner, Vanessa Santo Domingo, and her PPD counterpart, Karla Angleró, suggested that the machines’ slowness and failure could be due to the expiration of the equipment’s useful life, which debuted in 2016. In 2024, the machines became the property of the CEE.

Angleró also claimed that they had not received adequate maintenance.

The setbacks with the machines during the primaries led electoral commissioners to consider replacing Dominion with another company for the general elections. Due to the proximity of the event, they opted to maintain the contract with the company and extend it until December 2024.

These problems with the machines recurred before polling stations opened on November 5. The previous weekend, when local electoral commissions began counting at-home votes, the machines started failing, rejecting ballots even though they were correctly marked. A CEE official who requested anonymity told the CPI that in their polling station of 1,040 ballots, the machines rejected 235.

They said that on Sunday, November 3, they resumed counting domicile votes around 7:00 a.m., but near 11:00 a.m., they received a new instruction from the CEE to start counting everything from scratch. Ballots that the machines did not read due to indeterminate marks had to be placed in an envelope. “All the work from Saturday was lost,” they recounted.

The CPI confirmed with two electoral workers in Arecibo that when the machines did not read the marks made by voters in domicile votes, they opted to darken the squares themselves at local commissions “so that the machine could recognize them.”

The number of errors in tabulating domicile votes led electoral commissioners to decide on November 21 to start “from scratch” the counting of these ballots nine days after starting the General Canvass.

Worse Than the 2020 Elections

The defects in the voting equipment were not the only repeated complaints from voters in the form launched by the CPI to collect their experiences.

Long lines were a recurring complaint. Particularly, voters expressed surprise and annoyance because a single line was organized to enter the school or voting building, only to be told in which room they were voting in. An unnecessary task if they had been informed that they could find their polling station or room information from their cell phones by accessing the Voter Consultation or finding the room with the poster corresponding to the letters of their last names.

“There was no order or guidance at the school. Everyone was in a single line for all polling stations. I got tired of waiting and went straight to the room,” recounted a voter from San Juan, who took between one and two hours from arriving at their electoral unit to casting their vote. Similarly, another voter, who took almost four hours at their voting center, said: “It was extremely tedious to have to make two lines. Before, at the entrance, they guided you individually and quickly directed you to the polling station you were assigned to. This delayed the processes.”

The way voters were organized to enter, combined with the five ballots included in this election, and the machine failures contributed to the long lines at the polls.

An analysis of voting time by age groups shows that younger voters — aged 18 to 44 — took less than an hour to vote, while those aged 55 and older, although representing a smaller proportion of survey participants, waited more than four hours to vote.

Mixed and Combined Polling Stations

Easy access polling stations aim to ensure voting for voters with physical disabilities, limitations, or barriers affecting their mobility, while provisional voting stations are established for those not included in the voter lists and claim the right to vote. In several electoral units, both types of polling stations were assigned to the same room, number one.

“I believe this was an agreement among the [electoral] commissioners, and that’s why the process of added voters and easy access was handled in polling station one. I was a coordinator [of the electoral unit], and in our school, we made efforts to prioritize people who needed easy access or had mobility issues,” explained José Torres Valentín, a lawyer and electoral unit coordinator in University Gardens for the PIP in these elections, who recalled that in previous elections, these polling stations were kept separate.

Voter Natalia Santiago opined that combining these polling stations violated the rights of people with functional diversity since “they should have their quick access room ready, accessible, and with a machine. When I asked at the coordinators’ table, they told me the forms for people with functional diversity had run out when it was 11:00 a.m. Also, people with functional diversity and their companions are supposed to be able to vote together. I was my father’s companion, and they didn’t let me vote.”

The form the voter refers to is a card with an access code provided by election workers at the entrance table to those requesting to vote in the Easy Access Polling Station.

Merging these polling stations caused longer waiting times in line, to the point that it discouraged a voter in San Juan, who left without exercising her right to vote. “I don’t have a disability, but I’m 62 years old and was already tired, knowing I wouldn’t last three more hours [in line]. When my husband came out, I left without voting for the first time in my life. Apparently, the delay in that polling station was because people who couldn’t climb stairs were assigned to that polling station,” said Teresa Acosta, a voter who tried to vote at El Señorial Elementary School, in a survey conducted by the Roam Puerto Rico platform with a hundred people and shared with the CPI.

For Some Workers, Two Hours Aren’t Enough to Vote

While only 17.5% of survey participants indicated they worked on election day, the majority (16.6%) agreed that two paid voting hours were insufficient. Some groups were organized so all employees could vote without affecting work hours. “Among coworkers, we had to organize to be able to go out and vote,” said a voter from Gurabo who works in the metropolitan area.

For other employees, “it was an incredibly stressful day, given the long lines and the added pressure of workplace expectations,” said a voter from Cabo Rojo. “I work in the private sector. My employer sent us an email saying it was a normal workday and that if you wanted to vote, you should do so by early voting. This email was sent just when the period to apply (for early voting) was about to end, so we didn’t have time, or the CEE’s pagination was giving errors. Then they told us we had the two paid hours, but we had to fulfill the shift even if it took longer. I know employees who didn’t vote for fear of reprisals,” detailed.

Closed Schools as Voting Centers

Six years ago, the Rexford Guy Tugwell School in Cayey and Rosa Bernard School in Río Grande were closed. Despite the time since their closure and the poor conditions of their structures, these schools served as voting centers both in 2020 and this year.

According to Keila Fontánez Fontánez via the online form, at Rexford Guy Tugwell School, “three [electoral] polling stations” were crammed into a single room, causing “incredible crowding and no decent waiting space for a mostly elderly community. We only had a mini tent to shelter a dozen [people] if it rained.” Rexford Guy Tugwell School is electoral unit 13 of precinct 77 with 990 registered voters, of which 553 voted in these elections.

In the case of Río Grande, a voter complained because the room where they voted “was next to a puddle of water, as it was also raining, not to mention it was one of the two rooms with the highest volume of voters.” Rosa Bernard School is unit 12 of precinct 102, with 3,554 registered voters, of which 1,697 exercised their right to vote on November 5. The campus, which is a closed school, consists of six buildings. Weeks after the election, two abandoned buildings are still identified with CEE signs.

Journalist Vanessa Colón Almenas contributed to this story.