The New York State Board of Elections released a formal statement on Election Day addressing the countywide ballot-scanning disaster in Westchester County, where voting machines at the vast majority of polling locations rejected paper ballots from the moment polls opened at 6 a.m.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, the chaos began immediately and forced voters across the county to place completed ballots into orange emergency bags (later supplemented by blue ones when supplies ran short) for later counting under bipartisan oversight.

County Executive Ken Jenkins, a Democrat, later described the situation as a "debacle" and "unacceptable," stating that as many as 250,000 ballots across 332 polling sites were impacted.

According to the state board's statement, the root cause was a late change to a contest in one municipality that required updated election programming after the initial preparation and testing of Election Day equipment. That updated programming was tested and deployed for early voting and for Election Day machines in that single municipality.

Everywhere else in Westchester, however, the machines continued running the original programming and therefore could not recognize or accept the Election Day ballots.

The board is now working with the Westchester County Board of Elections to deploy replacement election media containing the updated programming.

The immediate priority, officials said, is to restore scanning capability to at least one machine at every polling location, with more machines brought online throughout the day. In the meantime, emergency ballot procedures remain in effect.

The state board insisted the scanners rejected unrecognized ballots rather than incorrectly tabulating them, and that "every valid vote will be counted" with established canvass, recanvass, and post-election audit procedures remaining in place. "Accuracy will never be sacrificed for speed," the statement declared.

This official explanation came after the Westchester County Board of Elections initially blamed the thickness of the paper ballots, an explanation it quickly walked back, before the state clarified the programming mismatch.

Early reports from local outlets and voters in places including New Rochelle, Ossining, North Salem, and Croton-on-Hudson described machines rejecting ballot after ballot from the first voters of the day.