Trying to Piece It Together

Here's my attempt to gather info so that we might piece together what happened Monday night.

Election results. What are the tapes? When you vote, your ballot goes into that big box and it gets scanned. You have to wait around to make sure that it's "accepted" by the box. Apparently sometimes the box doesn't like your ballot (it's never happened to me personally), but in these cases your ballot is kept aside and considered to be an "UNREAD." These will be manually tallied. More on that later.

Once the polls are closed, we wait around for the "tapes" from each box. It looks like a receipt. Here are the tapes from this past Monday's election.

You'll notice that at the bottom (see Precinct 1 image) that they are certified /signed by election officials.

Precinct 1

Precinct 2

Precinct 3

Precinct 4

Precinct 5

Precinct 6

Now, the machine can only detect the bubble next to a write-in candidate. It can't read the name written there. So, all of the ballots need to be looked at to determine who the write-in candidates are and how many votes each candidate got.

So for each precinct, the election officials went through all the ballots to determine again how many votes went to Ellen, how many to Julie, how many to Jon (via write-in), and how many to other write-in candidates.

According to observers that I talked to, this manual count happened twice. And as the counts were happening, they election officials were verbally updating the observers with the new counts.

So, this is how observers were informed that not all of the 1461 write-in votes were going to Jon.

And this brings us to QUESTION 1: As the election workers were verbally updating the observers with these numbers, how was it being officially recorded? Was there a master chart somewhere that was being updated? And did that chart have similar signatures as the tapes to certify these updates?

Now, remember those "UNREAD" ballots that I mentioned earlier? Here is where they come in. They need to be read manually also and added to the tallies for each precinct.

QUESTION 2: How were the UNREAD counts updated? Were they added to a master chart? And does the addition of those counts also have certification / signatures from election officials?

I've only talked to a couple people who were observing. So this part of the story is my opinion. At this point the Town Clerk told observers that they were done and gave them the final tally for Jon's votes only. Some observers concluded that with that final tally, that Jon was still leading by about 11 votes. However, I think this was based on comparing that number with the tallies for Ellen and Julie from the tapes - not the updated numbers including the UNREADS.

As people were leaving, they asserted that Jon had won a seat, and the Town Clerk congratulated Jon. And two other school committee members said to him something like, I guess we'll be working together. -- These last 2 sentences of the story were contradicted by the Town Clerk in a local blog today.

Now it was nearly 11pm and observers were leaving and election workers were packing up.

Sometime in the next hour or so, unofficial results were posted for the election. And in these results, Jon had, in fact, not won a seat on the committee.

So what happened?

I do believe that it's important for us to get answers to QUESTION 1 and QUESTION 2 posed above. That way we can understand exactly the effect of the UNREADS.

We may never know who congratulated or didn't congratulate whom. And perhaps it's not relevant to whether the election was fair. I've learned from this that I will look to see the counts and signatures for myself in the future if I ever observe on election night.

If the town will release the documentation associated with QUESTION 1 and QUESTION 2, then some of the fog can be cleared, and maybe our faith in democracy and our election system can be renewed.