As most voters in the November 5 election know, we had a problem with our electronic survey bookswhich were slowed down, forcing people to wait up to an hour to vote. Some voters were unable to wait long or return later, and I sincerely apologize to anyone who found themselves in this situation. The good news is that there were probably very few such people.

Comparing turnout rates in Jefferson to other large blue counties, like Fayette, there was almost exactly the same percentage drop in votes between 2020 and 2024. So the morning delays didn’t have any impact. impact on results.

Let me give you some details about what really happened, now that we’ve had a chance to look into it.

First, our outstanding team of election officials was able to work under pressure in this demanding environment and then help us resolve the issue that was slowing the production of electronic poll books by mid-morning. A few ridings took longer.

At least one of our election officials wrote to the Courier Journal to complain about a comment from my office; and also ask some detailed questions about the electronic survey logs we use. I can state this categorically: our constituency officers were in no way to blame. In explaining the delay to the public that morning, we mentioned early reports that precincts that had not activated their electronic poll books early in their implementation had the most problems downloading data from the Wi-Fi connection. We always train our agents on this first, but they have a lot of things to prepare before 6 a.m. and usually it doesn’t take that long to download the data anyway.

Mail: I am an election official. As people waited to vote, I saw a different side of Kentucky

It turned out that on Election Day there was too much data for the Wi-Fi system that morning and turning it on earlier wouldn’t help matters much.

Secondly, we have been mandated by the National Elections Council since 2020 to use electronic voting registers, replacing paper lists. These are relatively new items, and unlike the simple, robust optical-scanning voting machines we’ve used to count our votes for decades, this technology still has a learning curve. Initially, we had a product from a small company called Tenex that had limited features and support. In 2023, we moved to the ES&S product, which allowed things like automatic selection to print ballots on demand. This is why early voting is happening so quickly now.

But we also have more than 200 Election Day voting sites and plenty of equipment to deliver days in advance. That’s why we use a Wi-Fi update process on Election Day, instead of waiting until Sunday to download the data over cable and then deliver the machines. So far this has been sufficient and our vendor was confident this process could handle more data, but this proved optimistic.

Notice: After the election defeat, I suffered for Harris and America

Now that we know and understand what happened, it will be fairly easy to remedy this problem and our 2026 vote should go smoothly. In the 26 years I have served as County Clerk, I am pleased to say that we have had virtually no problems running our elections, even during the difficult COVID-19 year that is 2020 .

I am confident that with the excellent bipartisan staff we have in our election center and the thousands of civic-minded election officials who volunteer to serve every election, future elections will continue to be secure, accurate and as free from delays as permitted by law.

Bobbie Holsclaw is the Jefferson County Clerk.

This article was originally published in the Louisville Courier Journal: Opinion: Jefferson County voting delays won’t happen in 2026 election