del.icio.usSpoiled elections don't just happen in Florida and Ohio - they happen all over the country, including here. I'd like to tell you the story of an election here in Massachusetts, in 2004, where an elected office went to the candidate who got fewer votes.
Every four years, on the presidential primary ballot, Massachusetts voters elect people to their party's state & local committees. In 2004, a Democratic State Committee seat for the Middlesex, Suffolk & Essex district was contested by two write-in candidates: Lesley Phillips and Patty Cheever.
The district covers parts of Allston-Brighton, Cambridge, Somerville, Revere, Saugus, and all of Everett and Chelsea. Cheever campaigned only in the north shore part of the district, primarily in her hometown of Everett; Phillips campaigned in Cambridge, Somerville, and Allston-Brighton. I was an organizer with MassForDean, and we had endorsed Lesley Phillips along with a slate of candidates across the state for Democratic committee spots.
Most of the cities and towns in the district reported their tallies promptly, and the numbers were very close. We were cautiously hopeful - all we needed were a handful of votes from Boston, where Cheever hadn't campaigned and we had. We also saw some potentially incorrectly recorded votes in Cambridge and requested a recount. Then came the numbers from Boston: nothing.
I hadn't slept on the night before the primary. All night, I and several other MassForDean members distributed flyers and put up signs. Our flyers had one side making the case for why voters should still vote for Howard Dean, even though he'd stopped campaigning the month before; the other side listed the MassForDean slate for Democratic State Committee, Ward Committee, and Town Committee spots all over the state, organized by city/town. Dean's name and popularity were still high, and there were many voters in these very liberal neighborhoods who would be inclined to support Deanies for party office, and write in a name from a MassForDean slate. I personally distributed thousands of these flyers on car windows that night, including several hundred in the Allston-Brighton precincts Lesley was running in.
Not one single vote? It didn't make sense. And then we discovered two things...
- We asked to see the tally sheets, and found that the spots for write-in tallies were left blank. They hadn't written 0, they simply hadn't bothered to count write-ins at all.
- Boston had taken so long to report results, that the same day they reported, was also the deadline for requesting a recount. By the time we realized that they hadn't counted at all, it was too late - the deadline had passed.
After we gained a few votes in Cambridge, the result stood at 68 to 68, a tie. Cheever hadn't received any votes in Cambridge or Somerville, and there was no reason to believe she had any in Allston-Brighton. We were sure we'd won. But what to do?
Catch-22: Because we hadn't requested a recount before the deadline, we'd have to go to court with evidence. The evidence was on the ballots. And since the deadline had passed, the ballots were sealed - we couldn't look at them without a court order. The elections division couldn't help us. The fact that we'd missed the deadline because Boston took so long to report results didn't matter. The fact that they were required to count write-in votes and failed to do so, didn't matter.
In the end, we went through the Democratic State Committee's process for resolving a tie. A mini-convention of sorts was held, and DSC members voted on the two candidates. They picked Cheever, and she got the office. Since then, we've heard from a number of voters in Allston-Brighton that yes, they did vote for Lesley Phillips.
It doesn't take a grand conspiracy or deliberate fraud to spoil an election. It doesn't require hacked voting machines. Sometimes, all it takes is sloppiness, lax enforcement, and poor election procedures.
(Next Tuesday, an all-write-in election in the city of Boston will pick a State Senator.)
