The manufacturer of the city’s jam-plagued ballot scanners misled the Board of Elections about the devices’ vulnerability to humidity, which likely contributed to the Big Apple’s Election Day meltdown, The Post has learned.
Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software claimed its scanners could operate in any humidity level in a key document it filed as part of its winning bid for the $56 million contract.
But ES&S contradicts itself in the very instruction manual it publishes for the model of scanner the BOE purchased, filings with authorities in other states show.
“Humidity and wetness were a factor in the paper jams on Election Day and ES&S was not transparent in the contract about the implications of wetness and humidity,” said Alex Camarda, an elections expert with the government watchdog Reinvent Albany.
At a City Council hearing Tuesday, ES&S executive Judd Ryan denied humidity played a role in the Nov. 6 fiasco.
“Humidity is not an issue,” Ryan said, noting that the machines operate in Florida and Alabama, where conditions are typically more humid than in New York. There were also fewer jams on Staten Island, which had a simpler one-page ballot compared to the two-pager in the other boroughs.
But humidity did play a role in the scanner jams, experts said.
“You can think of the paper as a sponge, and a dry sponge is much thinner than a wet sponge — the paper stores the water in the air,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, an expert with the Center for Democracy & Technology. “It makes it harder for the machines to move the paper through the rollers.
“It causes a meltdown,” he said.
Indeed, ES&S’ manual warns the maximum humidity level for running the machines is 50 percent. The company provided the guidance in a 2012 manual provided to Idaho election officials and a 2017 filing in Michigan, both obtained by ProPublica.
A copy of the manual obtained by Reinvent Albany offered the same guidance of 50 percent.
The humidity level in New York was nearly double that just before the polls opened. At 5:51 a.m., weather stations at Central Park and JFK Airport had readings of 100 percent humidity.
ES&S has claimed that its system is humidity-proof.
There is “no humidity requirement” that restricts the operation of the scanners, it wrote in its winning bid to secure the city contract.
“ES&S claims that there is no humidity requirement for its scanner,” the BOE-commissioned technical evaluation reported, while rival firm Dominion provided no comparable information.
ES&S scored 60 points while Dominion got 53 in the evaluation’s category that included humidity. Those 7 points helped ES&S earn its overall 22-point edge in the technical contest.
It won the contract in 2009.
Election experts assailed ES&S’s contract-document claims.
“I’ve got a feeling the state Attorney General’s Office is going to take a look at this,” Hall said.
ES&S defended the claim.
“We are confident officials understood machine humidity requirements during the bid process and beyond,” a spokeswoman for ES&S told The Post.