LITTLE ROCK — Secretary of State Mark Martin’s new nearly $400,000 election-night-reporting website lagged behind results reported by media outlets during Tuesday’s primary election, and some counties’ results still were missing from it Thursday afternoon.
But Martin’s spokesman Alex Reed said the site did better than election-reporting websites previously offered by the state.
The website - accessible at sos.arkansas.gov/elections and votenaturally.com - was launched Saturday before the primary.
“This was our test run before the November general [election],” Reed said. “It was a vast improvement over what our website had been reporting in past elections.”
But Newton County’s results were still missing from the website until late Thursday afternoon. That county had had difficulty uploading its numbers on the website Tuesday night, so officials there faxed a handwritten spreadsheet of the results to the secretary of state’s office and left for the night, Reed said.
He said that on Wednesday and Thursday, the secretary of state’s office worked with Newton County clerk officials to help them enter their results on the website.
Also Thursday, White County results were still missing for eight of that county’s 90 precincts; and results were still missing Wednesday from Marion and Randolph counties.
Reed said the website should have complete numbers now. He blamed the delay mostly on human error not problems with the technology.
He said that in past elections, some counties took days to send their information to the secretary of state, and some waited until the results had been certified before sending them.
Arkansas Code Annotated 7-7-203 (e)(1) gives a county board of election commissioners up to 10 days to certify the results of a primary election. In this election that deadline is June 1.
The earliest a board can certify results is 48 hours after an election, he said.
Reed said getting the results onto the website was also slowed because after Tuesday night, attention turned to the June 12 runoff elections. Early voting begins June 5.
The computer program, ClarityElections, is run by SOE Software of Tampa, Fla.
The secretary of state’s office spent $384,815 for the software and to create the website, Reed said. It will also pay $79,096 per year for the next two years for technical support, with the option of extending that support for two additional years.
The website shows precinct-level results for contests from president to justice of the peace and municipal races.
The data - including voter turnout, election results and graphics - are available as a list of numbers in a spreadsheet, which allows visitors to view state and county maps color-coded with results.
To get the data to the website, counties used their current vote-tabulation system, created a file and uploaded it to the secretary of state’s website. Columbia, Ouachita and Union counties had to manually enter their results because of the ages of their computer systems, Reed said, and the secretary of state’s office wants to find a way around that before the November election.
The secretary of state’s office reported no major problems during Tuesday’s election.
“The bumpy times were the four months earlier when we were working with the counties” to teach them about the system, he said. “It was smooth, it was fun and we think it was a success.”
Reed said the delay in reporting the results online was a matter of county election officials not being familiar with the technology.
Vanessa Moore, who normally does the payroll in the Newton County clerk’s office, was in charge of entering that county’s election data. She said that on election night there were problems with the computer and a flash drive containing the vote tabulations.
“I’m not liking it just yet,” Moore said of the new system, “just not getting things to work properly.”
Reed said that White County result were delayed while officials there aligned about 200 absentee ballots with their correct precincts.
He said there will be more training for the counties’ clerks before the Nov. 6 election, adding that for some counties, June’s primary runoffs will give them some additional hands-on training.
“We’re going to conduct more and more training over the summer and get people familiar with the process,” Reed said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 05/28/2012