Here is the full press release from Secretary Galvin referenced in the Globe story linked below.
Secretary of the Commonwealth William F. Galvin, the states chief elections officer, said today, I will be seeking the order of a Superior Court judge to allow the counting of eight (8) precincts of uncounted ballots in the 2nd Suffolk Senate District Democratic primary which have been sealed mistakenly by Boston election personnel.
Despite their extraordinary efforts at educating election day personnel for the unprecedented write-in efforts in that district primary, a good faith clerical error was made by precinct workers, preventing a complete tally of the 2nd Suffolk Senate District Democratic returns.
Secretary Galvins petition will be submitted in Suffolk Superior Court tomorrow, seeking an immediate count of those eight precincts.
Challenger Sonia Chang-Diaz had described the situation as “our own little Florida” even before the eight missing precincts were discovered.
Stay tuned to this one, folks. We’ll post updates as we get them.
Did Galvin move this quickly the last time around?
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Despite the loss, perhaps Galvin noticed that he has a vulnerablility here and he is trying to act to close it.
I don’t think Galvin is sweating this squeaker of a win. In reality,Galvin kicked some serious butt in this election. In fact I cannot remember a wider margin of victory except maybe by Saddam Hussein or Mao. Can it be that he is just doing his job as he usually does? I do not recall any electoral disasters (a la Florida or Ohio) on Galvin’s watch. I know that you guys really dig Bonifaz but please give Galvin a break here. I myself have reserved my ire for the people who voted for Wilkerson.
I noticed this in Galvin’s press release when I saw it on boston.com earlier:
It sounds an attempt to put good spin on a bad situation. I highly doubt that adequate training was given to election day personnel.
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Almost two years ago, when I first met Sam Yoon at the January 2005 meeting of DFA Boston, I got a chance to speak to him for a few minutes at the end of the meeting. And I remember spending a good chunk of that time telling him how badly elections were counted in the city of Boston. The problems we’re seeing now look and feel exactly like the problems I was already so concerned about two years ago, and that had been there for a long time before.
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I hope this election serves as a wake-up call to overhaul the way elections are administered in Boston so that they count every vote. And that means really training election day personnel, not just saying they got the training they need when they obviously didn’t.
about the election was that Sonia Chang-Diaz didn’t snag a win. I hope she pulls through with these.
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But you know how recounts usually go. Same old bullshit.
We don’t know yet whether Sonia “snagged a win” or not. We really don’t. The number of ballots that are not counted or might be questionable (and not just from the eight precincts) dwarfs the margin between Wilkerson and Chang-Diaz. Either candidate may have won.
But I’ve learned not to get my hopes up about recounts.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking Wilkerson won unless a “recount” overturns it. At the very least thousands of votes haven’t been counted in the first place, and not just in the eight precincts that we know have no tallies at all. You don’t need to get your hopes up, there’s just no reason to have them taken down in the first place. We’re just in an extended version of the early portion of election night, with some early returns showing a very close race, and waiting to get the rest of the numbers.
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Expect our public officials to sort this out and count the votes.
Except replace “expect” with “demand”.
according to a story on WBUR. The report said that Galvin got the court order today to count the precincts, not that he was going to submit the petition tomorrow.
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I don’t know whether the Globe or WBUR is correct about the petition’s status, and the WBUR story isn’t available from their web site yet.
is Motion time in the Superior Court. Trials are usually held in the morning, break for lunch at 1 and at 2:00 pm all the lawyers with motions appear.
WBUR screwed up their news report. Later squibs during the on-the-hour newsbriefs also made it sound as if Galvin already had the court order to unseal the ballot boxes so they may be counted.
Check it out at http://www.boston.co… .
got it before the judge then good for him. He may have rushed someone up there yesterday afternoon. The 2:00 pm time just gave me the impression that he may be going before the judge on Thursday.
Does anyone know if the missing precincts would count more on the Wilkerson side or the Chang-Diaz side? Curious…
I think it’s half and half. 4 in the south end, mission hill, JP – good areas for Sonia; 4 in Roxbury and Dorchester – good areas for Diane.
How is it possible for NOT counting any write in votes in SO many precincts be a a good faith clerical error ? Had the precinct workers not heard there was a write-in election? I can’t even imagine how this could happen.
…”clerical error” might not be totally inaccurate. Let me tell you that in the precincts I watched close, which were Boston 5-7 and 5-8, the performance and the level of knowledge of the poll workers was very disturbing. Those I spoke with seemed to have very little understanding of the nature of the race, for starts. It took a long time for it to sink in that there were no regular votes in the race, only write-ins. No one had apparently briefed them on this. Even worse, there was no procedure in place whatsoever as to how to count the ballots. I am not talking about how to judge the questionable ballots (“S Diaz” counts for whom, and so forth); I am talking about a basic procedure for how to collect all the write-in ballots and count them out for each candidate. The poll workers at 5-7 had to do this twice, because they went through the count once and then concluded they had done something wrong, so they did a lot of head-scratching and ended up recounting everything.
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Finally…and the reason I say the 8 precincts of uncounted ballots could well be a clerical error … is that the poll workers at 5-7 were expressly saying regarding some of the write-in ballots, “We are not going to figure this out; they will do it at City Hall.” As best I was able to observe it, they made no effort to evaluate any ballots whose marking deviated from the norm (sticker in the wrong place; candidate name written unclearly; etc). They were expressing the sentiment that they would send the ballots to City Hall, where a more thorough count would happen. They repeated this so many times, I left with the impression that the counts at the precinct were in fact preliminary. I now believe that in fact they would be final, unless someone called for a recount. Yet, the poll workers at my precinct were not even remotely implementing the procedures for judging write-in votes, due to the apparently completely incorrect belief that “City Hall would figure it out”.
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Therefore, if another precinct (or several) had decided not to count the write-ins at all, because “that will be figured out at City Hall” or something like that, I would not be surprised. Based on the confusion I observed, I’d say such an error could well have been possible due to a lack of education about the race and proper procedures provided to the poll workers.
Will, thanks for this comment! Would you repost it here? I’d love to collect as many firsthand reports as we can get on that post.
I doubt many people remember it, but Secretary Galvin ordered a full recount in the City of Boston after the November 2000 election, after discovering that zero votes had been recorded in some precincts for all ballot measures. Here’s a Boston Globe article from the time:
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GALVIN CITES CONCERN, ORDERS BOSTON RECOUNT
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Author(s): Steven Wilmsen, Globe Staff Date: November 10, 2000
Page: B6 Section: Metro/Region
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Secretary of State William F. Galvin has ordered a recount of all Boston ballots after city election workers discovered at least 30,000 votes were overlooked in 51 precincts scattered around the city.
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The problem – blamed on old machines and human error – affected only ballot questions, not candidates for office, authorities said. And the number of votes in question probably won’t be large enough to overturn already reported results. But it could encourage animal-rights activists to demand a statewide recount of ballots cast on Question 3, the proposal to ban greyhound racing that lost by about 65,000 votes.
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Though the audit probably won’t change the state election, observers say it is another unsettling insight into potential frailties of the American voting apparatus – particularly as the fate of the nation’s presidency hangs on ballot problems in Florida.
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“I don’t want to take any chances with this,” Galvin said yesterday, adding that his staff has invited all the political committees to observe the recount.
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“I want them to see the machines unlocked. I want them to see the counting. I don’t want any lingering questions whatsoever,” he said.
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The problem surfaced on Wednesday as Boston election officials double-checked tally sheets filled out by wardens who counted ballots at polling places the night polls closed.
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Many of the tally sheets showed no one voted on any ballot questions – even in precincts where thousands showed up.
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“That’s just nonsensical,” said Nancy Lo, who heads the city elections department. “With such a big turnout, it’s impossible you’re going to have zero.”
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Officials believe wardens in at least 51 of the city’s 254 precincts misread voting machines, which record votes on mechanical counters similar to odometers.
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The counters are arranged in rows and columns, and not all of them are used in a given election. Wardens may have mistakenly tallied votes from inactive counters while overlooking the ones recording the votes, officials said.
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City election officials said their estimate of 30,000 uncounted votes is based on the number of tally sheets showing no votes on ballot questions. But the count could go higher if wardens recorded other numbers incorrectly.
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Galvin said he has alerted Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly that he is seeking a recount and will ask a judge to approve that order quickly. The recount would likely take place next week.
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If the audit shows an even narrower loss for the dog-racing ban, activists could get a statewide recount with 1,000 signatures on a petition. Galvin would have to order the recount if the official tally shows the margin of defeat was less than half of 1 percent of the total number of voters on the question – about 12,000 votes.