Suffolk election results delayed due to Wi-Fi outage, officials say

Suffolk County officials delayed publication of 450,000 election night results for state, federal, and local races after a Wi-Fi outage, the Republican Party chairman said Tuesday night.

The county began posting results shortly after midnight.

County officials were supposed to upload the voting results on 1,446 memory cards at regional hubs around the county after polls closed at 9 a.m., but instead had to drive the cards from county polling places to election board headquarters in Yaphank, Suffolk Republican chairman Jesse Garcia said.

“That cannot be taken because we have limited Wi-Fi,” Garcia said.

Suffolk Democratic chairman Rich Schaffer said onstage Tuesday that because of the Suffolk cyberattack, they weren't expecting results for any Suffolk races until 2:30 a.m.

"I have some bad news for you," Schaffer told the crowd.

He said they would begin posting on the state Board of Elections website once they have "substantial results."

Garcia said officials had to drive memory cards with voting data to the election board headquarters in Yaphank where they were uploaded directly to the server.

"We want to get those numbers quickly but it's best that we get them accurately," Garcia said.

Suffolk County has been dealing with technological issues since a ransomware attack on county servers that occurred on Sept. 8. The issue shut down critical functions of county government. Suffolk election data was supposed to be uploaded to a landing page on the State Board of Elections website.

Deputy Elections Commissioner Gail Lolis told Newsday: "We have concerns about the uploading. We were having some difficulty with the uploading from the field, so we decided to have our staff take all the results … back to the Board [of Elections] to upload directly into the server."

She said they did "testing in the field" and "everything worked fine" before election night.

"We're not taking any chances. We don't want to take any chances of posting inaccurate unofficial results," she said.

Lolis said officials were unsure if it had to do with added county security protections "because of the hack," and added, "we did testing in the field" prior to the election.

With Rick Brand and Alfonso Castillo