County makes security footage from Building A available after outage

RENO, Nev. (KOLO) - NOV. 11 UPDATE: Washoe County has made security footage from the night of the camera outage available to the public.

That footage is broken into seven parts, each downloadable, and covers multiple sections of Building A.

It can be found by following the link here.

Washoe County is addressing the overnight outage of live feed cameras monitoring the counting of ballots.

They say the computer managing the livestream lost connection to the camera around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday night, and that that connection was not restored again until just before 8:00 a.m.

All staff had already left for the night around one hour before the incident and did not return again until 7:00 a.m., according to the county. Connection was restored at 7:53 a.m. Thursday.

The county also says these cameras intermittently lose connection with the computer.

They say their security administrator reviewed security camera footage from overnight and found that no one entered the ballot room or Registrar’s Office during the time when the camera was down. That footage will be made available to the public, the county says.

Staff badge reports were also pulled and found no employee entered the area during that time.

In a statement, Washoe County addressed how they plan to prevent similar outages in the future:

“In the future we will look for a solution that would prevent software disruptions or simply not offer a courtesy livestream feed.

Washoe County has been at the forefront of trying to innovate election transparency, but we have moved from an election night to a much longer election timeframe. The technology we are using to provide this livestream cannot keep up with these demands. We suggest enhancing transparency with security cameras rather than courtesy livestream cameras in future elections.”