DuPage could take weeks to count remaining ballots
Although Election Night is over, some of DuPage County's closest races may not officially be decided for weeks.
Joseph Sobecki, interim executive director of the DuPage Election Commission, said Wednesday it may take as long as two weeks for the commission to receive and tabulate all mail-in votes that had to be postmarked by Tuesday and to make decisions on any outstanding provisional ballots.
The counting of those additional ballots could have a direct impact on races that appeared to be decided by a relatively small number votes, he said.
The overall voter turnout in DuPage was roughly 15.5 percent on Tuesday, he said, the lowest percentage since at least 2011 when 16.5 percent of registered voters cast ballots.
But that percentage may be misleading, Sobecki said, because of a recent jump in the number of registered voters.
"After (November's) presidential election, our voter roll went up ... with 40,000 new registered voters," he said. "We typically see about a 20,000 increase between presidential election cycles every four years. So we went up 40,000 in a matter of half a year. I think that's pretty significant thanks to the availability of same-day registration and online registration."
With more voters comes a demand for more immediate and accurate election results and Sobecki said the commission is building toward that goal in 2020 after its website crashed for more than 90 minutes as results rolled in Tuesday night.
He said the commission will try to acquire funding that would allow it to seek bids for a vendor-driven cloud solution that could use different scales for different types of elections.
"For the consolidated election, you have more candidates, which means more people hitting the site on their mobile devices," Sobecki said. "In the presidential election, there are fewer people hitting the site but they're getting a larger volume of data with countywide races and state races and things like that."
In the meantime, the commission has hired an independent consultant to find out what happened to cause the server to crash Tuesday night.