WINCHESTER — Two
election results were overturned in a recount Tuesday, in a process that
revealed a broad discrepancy in vote counts.
The recount saw Ben
Kilanski elected to a three-year term on the Winchester School Board,
and Kenneth Berthiaume to a one-year term as a Thayer Public Library
trustee. Both had been just shy of victory on election night last week;
both filed for recounts soon after.
In the original vote on March 21,
Kilanski finished two votes behind Nicole Pelkey, with 295 votes to
Pelkey’s 297, for one of two, three-year terms on the school board.
Incumbent Kevin Bazan took the other seat with 321 votes.
Following the recount, Kilanski received 296 votes to Pelkey’s 295 votes, thus winning by a single vote.
But the bigger upset came from
Berthiaume’s race. The original tally showed Berthiaume, who was seeking
re-election to the library trustee post, receiving 271 votes to
challenger Janet Marsh’s 276 votes.
After the recount Berthiaume
received 309 votes to Marsh’s 304 votes. The discrepancy in that race is
sizable — 66 fewer votes were counted on election night than in the
recount.
Town Clerk Jim Tetreault said
that all of the extra votes counted in the recount were a result of
ballots that had not been properly marked the first time around. The
AccuVote machines that Winchester and other New Hampshire towns use can
pick up only votes in which the bubbles are entirely filled in, he said.
In cases where voters circle
options instead of filling them in, the machine will not count the
result; in situations where both options appear filled in because the
voter changed his or her mind, the machine will also not count the
result, Tetreault said.
Tetreault said he didn’t know why
the library trustee race had received so many more unreadable votes
than other races. In an interview, Deputy Secretary of State David
Scanlan said he also didn’t know why.
Tetreault added that he didn’t see the case as evidence that the machines are faulty, an opinion shared by Scanlan.
Rather than a fault with the
machines, Scanlan said that the wide difference in vote counts was
likely a result of an addition error by those working the polls.
“On a discrepancy that big, I
would definitely take a look at the human factor,” he said this morning,
speaking on Winchester’s results.
Keeping closer track of the
overall vote count would have allowed Winchester election workers to
notice that one race had received substantially fewer votes than the
other races, Scanlan said.
Tetreault agreed with the
diagnosis, saying that the long working hours on election day may have
caused officials, who are volunteers, to make some addition errors
during the original ballot count and not see the machine wasn’t counting
a number of votes.
“This is a great learning opportunity that our team has to review things a bit closer than we did,” he said.
Would it be a conflict if Herbert was the chairman of the select board, because he is the chairman of the Diner meeting every morning?
ReplyDelete66 fewer votes, what the hell?
ReplyDelete