Blue Mass Group

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Ambiguous Write-In Votes: A Recount Story

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The election was for Democratic State Committeewoman in the Middlesex, Suffolk & Essex state senate district.  Every presidential primary year, a man and a woman are elected to the state committee in each of Massachusetts’ 40 senate districts, running on the same ballot as the candidates for president, and Democratic town and ward committees.  In 2004, the female seat in the MSE district was open, and Lesley Phillips, a founding member of Progressive Democrats of Cambridge (and now chair of the Cambridge ward 6 committee) decided to run as a write-in.  I was active in MassForDean, and she was one of a number of candidates for Democratic committee seats around the state that we endorsed in the March primary.

The MSE comprises parts of Allston-Brighton, Cambridge, Somerville, Revere, Saugus, and all of Everett and Chelsea – it’s the district currently held by Senator Jarrett Barrios.  As it turns out, there was another write-in candidate.  Patty Cheever campaigned only in Everett and Chelsea, while Lesley Phillips campaigned mostly in Cambridge, Somerville, and Allston-Brighton.

The day after the election, we got the write-in results from most of the district, and Phillips was several votes behind Cheever.  In Cambridge, we saw a few votes for Lesley Phillips for State Committeeman (rather than State Committeewoman, the office she was actually running for), and a few votes for variations on her name.  Although Boston had not yet reported the write-in numbers for their portion of the district, we decided not to wait, and asked Cambridge for a recount of the ward in question.

On the appointed day, I walked into the Cambridge Elections Commission, volunteering as a recount observer for Lesley Phillips’ campaign.  The city’s volunteer vote counters sat in pairs at a long table, each pair with a stack of ballots for one of the precincts.  Our job was simple to observe the ballots as they flipped through them, hear which ones they were recording as votes for Lesley, and call a stop if we thought they missed one.  We had been briefed on what to look for: a certain number of ballots with Lesley’s name in the “Committeeman” spot, a few variations of her name, and a few which had been reported as unreadable, but might on further inspection look like her name.

It turns out that some of the votes we thought Lesley would gain, had been added to her total in the original count.  Still, we gained one here and there… and then we got to “Louise Phillips“.

Two ballots had that name clearly written on them.  We knew that nobody with that name was running for the seat, and we’d also looked in the Cambridge phone book and could find no Louise Phillips.  Clearly, these were voters who intended to vote for Lesley Phillips but misremembered her name, right?

We made our case, and the judges conferred… they seemed to be convinced.  Then one of them said, “hold on a minute, let me look at something!”  She left the room, and came back a few minutes later.  Yup, she’d just remembered and checked: There was a poll worker at that precinct named Louise Phillips.  With a credible possibility that these two write-ins were from friends of the poll worker, they voted unanimously against counting the two votes for Lesley Philips.

They made the correct decision.  And yet, minutes earlier, they were ready to make the opposite decision, and it would’ve been correct, if they hadn’t known there was a Louise Phillips at that polling place.  We on Lesley’s campaign genuinely believed those two votes were votes for Lesley at the start, and our reasoning was solid in light of what we knew.  The might in fact really have been votes for Lesley Phillips, despite Louise’s presence – we don’t know.  Sometimes, judging ballots is a fuzzy business.

Postscript: We gained enough votes in that recount to end up 1 vote short, until Cambridge turned up a simple error in another ward that netted us 1 more vote, for a tie.  We waited for Boston to report their results… and got a spoiled election where the candidate who got fewer votes ended up in office.  But that is another story…

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Comments

  1. How confident do you feel that there actually was a poll worker at the precinct in question named Louise Phillips?

  2. The intent of the voter, like beauty, often is in the eye of the beholder.  Interestingly, all the precincts in the Second Suffolk Senate district will be monitored for the entire process by two independent observers from the Department of Justice at each polling location. 

  3. Years ago, when John Michael Curley had a primary challanger named John Sullivan, he got two MORE John Sullivans to take out papers, too.  The three Johns split the vote, and Curley defeated his challanger.  (from the great political book, ‘the Purple Shamrock’, a top-notch bio of Curley).

  4. Just curious- has anyone here served on a Board of Electors?  How would you handle the prospect of “S. Diaz” or some other similarly ambiguous designation?

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    Could you come to a consensus on certain things before the count even starts (all the “S. Diazes” would be split evenly or something like that) or does it have to be a ballot by ballot determination?

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    My thinking is, if you were to throw out all the “S. Diaz” votes because they are ambiguous that would merely benefit “D. Wilkerson” who is the one candidate who was clearly not the intended recipient of that particular vote?  Ugh, my head hurts…

    • Pretend you have a precinct with 40 votes for Sonia, 3 votes for Samiyah, and 6 “S. Diaz” write-ins.  Does it make sense to count them as if they were half and half?  That’s statistically unlikely to be the intent of those voters.  I suspect they just wouldn’t count those votes for either candidate, because the math do split them proportionally can get confusing (where exactly is the cutoff between, say, deciding those as 5 and 1, or all 6 for Sonia?).

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      On the other hand, what if you found that every single person who voted for Dunkelbarger, also voted for Sonia, except for a couple who voted for Dunkelbarger and wrote “S. Diaz” for state senate?  In that case, you can make a pretty solid guess that those two are votes for Sonia.

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      I know this is common practice in recounts in partisan elections: If someone votes a straight ticket for one party, except for one possibly ambiguous vote, they count that vote for the candidate of the party the voter picked for everything else.

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      If the voter writes something clear and unambiguous, well, then it’s clear and unambiguous.  If they write something that’s not so clear, they leave the counters to look at other clues.

    • I think that’s a big reason Sonia’s running as “Chang for Change”. In most situations, “S. Diaz” would be more likely to mean Samiyah Diaz not Sonia Chang-Diaz, but “S. Chang” would be clear.

  5. I worked on a successful write-in in the 04 primary and it was spread over two towns, so we checked with the clerks and they said that they would take anything that had his last name.

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    In this case it seems clear to me that a S. Diaz is a Shamiya vote, not a Chang-Diaz vote. I’m sure that either Chang or Sonia would have to be clear in order for a vote to go to Sonia. Seems that Diaz will benefit Shamiya more than Sonia.

    1. i still don’t understand the process. 

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    this is an unusual situation.  a confusing “Diaz” write-in seems likely.  what i don’t understand is why they can’t simply DECIDE BEFOREHAND so the process is transparent?  decide, post it on the web in advance.  then we all know the rules. 

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    why decide day-of election? 

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    2. cos, i don’t understand the standard that you cited.  i suppose it’s POSSIBLE that 2 voters wanted to vote for some poll worker named Louise Phillips, but it borders on the LUDICROUS.  based on the facts presented, i’d say 98% likely voter intent was probably to vote for your candidate, Lesley. 

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    why did you concede? 

    • 2.  Actually, it’s not so ludicrous.  Every precinct always gets a smattering of stray write-in votes for every office – people voting for themselves, their friends, their family, famous people, etc.  You get a lot of single votes, a few doubles, and an occasional triple (maybe a family who decided to all vote for their little brother, or a small group of friends, or something).  More than 3 votes for the same name, and it’s almost certainly someone who’s actually running.  1 or 2, who knows.

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      Now, once you know that someone by that name is actually present, and very likely known and liked by a lot of the voters in the precinct, the chances that two stray write-ins were actually for her are significant.

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      (A while back I said I’d stop responding to comments by GGW, and have kept to that, but I’ll make an exception since it’s my post, and a good question)

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