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York County demands postmortem after early-voting outage at Washington Square
Summary
County officials said a planned hardware update to core network switches caused connectivity problems at the Washington Square early-voting site; staff and vendors are working on a fix and the board asked for a formal investigation and a freeze on further changes to election-critical systems.
County officials said they were investigating a connectivity failure that disrupted early voting at the Washington Square site and asked staff to produce a formal postmortem.
Susan, the county administrator, told the board that staff notified the county of "some connectivity issues at the voter registrar office" and that early voting at Washington Square and Victory Village would continue through April 21; voters also had the option to vote provisionally during the outage. She said county staff and corporate partners were working through the night and expected services to be operational the next day.
The county's IT director, Mr. Wyatt, told supervisors the interruption followed a planned hardware replacement of the county's core network switches. "It was a hardware issue," he said, describing end-of-life replacement of core switches and an electrical and configuration mismatch when new Cisco equipment was installed. "The configuration was incorrect," he said, adding that outside consultants had validated configurations but the problem remained unresolved when voting began.
Board members pressed for answers about timing and responsibility. "Why in the world are we doing that type of maintenance on critical network infrastructure while early voting is active?" said Mr. Ryan, who asked for a detailed investigation report and for accountability from the vendor that preconfigured the equipment.
Supervisors directed staff to: produce a written postmortem explaining what failed and why, include vendor (Cisco and third-party preconfiguration) findings, and impose a change freeze on the remaining core switch until the board has reviewed the investigation. County staff said they would return with the requested report and that they expected voter services to resume without issue on the next business day.
The board did not take a formal vote on remedies at the meeting. Staff said the county would share findings with the board and recommended procedural changes to avoid similar disruptions during active elections.
