SEATTLE — At 8 p.m. every election night, candidates, consultants and other politics watchers obsessively click on the Secretary of State's website, waiting for the first vote tallies to roll in.

But in some recent elections — including on Tuesday — those initial vote counts have shown wildly inaccurate percentages in some closely watched races.

The glitches have typically been resolved within several minutes. Still, they've been glaring errors at the exact moment when the most eyes are on the state's election-results website.

The issue is even more perplexing as Secretary of State Steve Hobbs' office has been on notice for more than a year about the recurring election-night glitches, but has failed so far to fix them.

When it comes to election night, Hobbs' office has one main job. So what gives?

A spokesperson for Hobbs told The Seattle Times the problem has been caused by aging software that can't immediately keep up with results as they are reported in by 39 counties.

"It’s two different systems that are bringing data together," Charlie Boisner, the Hobbs spokesperson, said Wednesday morning. "The totals as well as the percentages are part of the systems. They're operating on different cycles. For a short time, they can be out of sync."

VoteWA, the state's main voter data system, has been continuously upgraded since it was released in 2019, while the secretary of state's "results generator" has not kept up with the pace of the technology, leading to the temporary glitches, Boisner added in an email.

As a result, on election night, in the state's hotly contested 26th Legislative District Senate race, Republican Michelle Caldier and Democrat Deb Krishnadasan were both initially shown absurdly getting more than 100% of the vote. Similarly, the secretary of state's results page for the statewide ballot measure on investing the WA Cares Fund, initially showed the "yes" side with 103% and the "no" side with about 91%.

"It's certainly frustrating when the results that are posted aren’t aligning with reality," Boisner acknowledged, adding the inaccurate displays "do resolve themselves pretty quickly."

Similar issues were seen in the August primary and in last year's presidential primary. Boisner said the problems "have been observed primarily during odd-year elections" which feature thousands of local races and ballot measurers, putting more of a strain on the system.

Boisner said state elections officials are working on a fix and will be replacing the current system they use to upload results from counties to the state website. He said the secretary of state's office received $292,000 for that work in the budget adopted earlier this year by the Legislature.

"Starting next year, we are going to have a new system that is going to eliminate this problem completely, he said.

The problems with the results displays don't affect the actual ballot counts, which are conducted by county elections offices.

Hobbs, a former Democratic state senator, was appointed as secretary of state in 2021 after Republican Kim Wyman resigned to take an election security position in the federal government. He won a special election in 2022 to fill the remainder of Wyman's term and was reelected last year to a full four-year term.

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