Beaver County has a new website for viewing election results and commissioners are praising it as a major improvement.
The site, run through Clarity Elections, is available here.
Until now, the county has posted election night results as PDF files uploaded every 20 to 30 minutes. Elections Director Colin Sisk said that was simply the best system available.
“Our election night results have traditionally been PDFs that are uploaded about every 20 to 30 minutes, because that was the best system that we had,” Sisk said. “But that is not ADA compliant in a way that we can do it instantaneously … it would take more lag time from when I generate a report to it being converted to something that would meet the standard … we would be doubling the length between reports.”
The accessibility requirement behind that comes from Washington. In April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice finalized a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Counties with populations of 50,000 or more were originally required to comply by April 2026. In April of this year, the Justice Department extended that deadline by a year, to April 26, 2027. Beaver County had 168,000 residents in the 2020 Census, more than triple that threshold.
The new site gets around that problem. It also can send push notifications to media outlets and party officials on election night whenever an update goes out.
The site lists the contests on the county’s ballot, including governor, the 17th Congressional District and the state Senate 46th and state House 14th, 15th and 16th districts. Each race shows the candidates by party with vote totals and percentages, along with the share of precincts reporting. Visitors can pull up a map, open detailed results for a contest or share it. A summary page tracks how many of the county’s 129 precincts have reported and voter turnout, measured against 114,603 registered voters. The data can also be downloaded in various formats.
County Commissioner Jack Manning praised the change.
“This is a tremendous upgrade,” Manning said.
