LIVE ELECTION UPDATES: Westchester to begin counting secured emergency ballots today

News 12
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Nov 4, 2026
Well the Westchester County Board
of Elections will officially start counting those emergency
ballots later on this morning.
A big question many voters had yesterday and a big concern
they had was how exactly will those ballots be safely collected
and then transferred
Over to the Board of Elections.
Well, I want all of you to take a look
at your screen right here for your answer.
This is what the scene looked like here at the Board
of Elections facility in Ardsley Tuesday night.
This is after the polls closed at 9.
Multiple police officers brought the bags filled
with thousands of secured emergency ballots to the spot
after a consent decree ordered
by a New York State Supreme Court justice.
That decree called for these procedures to ensure the security
and proper handling of all ballots cast.
The county board of elections says
those ballots will remain under continuous police
protection inside until counting begins at 11 this morning.
Currently, the only numbers in Westchester that the board
of elections has are from absentee ballots and early voting.
So there are still a lot of contests to still be decided officially.
Now, this is all because the majority of voting machines
in Westchester would not accept those paper ballots on Election Day.
And voters had to put them in secured orange bags.
The State Board of Elections says it had
to do with the machine's programming,
while the County Board of Elections and County Executive Ken Jenkins
says the issue was with the pre-printed ballot itself.
Either way, Jenkins says members
from both sides of the political spectrum
are teaming up to investigate what exactly went down.
We're going to convene a bipartisan team
to conduct a thorough review of the decisions
and failures that led to this debacle
and determine where accountability lies and ensure
that this never happens again.
And Jenkins went on to also say another reason why
this didn't happen during early voting was because they,
one, were using different machines, and two, all ballots
were printed on that same day when you would come in to vote.
We're in Ardsley, Westchester County, Katarina Bilalis, News 12.
