[ crossposted at Blue Mass Group ]

For much of the year, I have worked for John Bonifaz, not just promoting his campaign online, but also covering election issues to inform people about the state of Democracy in America and the problems we need to fix.  On Tuesday, I dedicated the day to Sonia Chang-Diaz's campaign for state senate in the Second Suffolk district.

The two streams combined: Tuesday night, I found myself at the center of the kinds of voting problems I'd written about on John's blog.  Even before Wednesday's announcement that eight precincts had no vote tallies at all, we knew there were hundreds, if not thousands, of votes not counted, and the election results uncertain.  On Wednesday, the Chang-Diaz campaign called John Bonifaz to help guide them through the process of seeing all the votes counted.

I'd like to commend the Boston elections department for being as helpful as they have, on election night and in advance.  Especially John Donovan - if we pull through this mess and end up with a full and reliable count of the votes, it will be partly thanks to him.  But make no mistake: the votes have not been counted, even without considering the 8 precincts that submitted no tallies.  It's not yet time to think about a "recount" - we still need a real first count.

As Bonifaz said many times on the campaign trail, we didn't know about the problems in Florida until 2000, and most of us didn't know about the problems in Ohio until 2004; if we have a really close result in a prominent election, we would find out that we also have problems here in Massachusetts.  Perhaps this will be the election that brings them to our attention.

Count the Votes?

During most of the last couple of hours before polls closed, and the next few hours after, I held the line 1 telephone and fielded a majority of the incoming calls.  Signs of trouble started early in the evening: the first time I got a call from a volunteer asking "they're supposed to count the votes, right?" I almost didn't know what to make of it.

A precinct warden had told our volunteer that she wouldn't need to observe the count after polls closed, because the poll workers didn't need to count the votes, just run them through the machine and then send them to city hall.  It wasn't the first such call.  Volunteers from at least six precincts called us in the hours before 8pm, worried because local elections officials had told them the precinct would not hand-count the vote.  I patiently confirmed our volunteers' understanding: yes, poll workers needed to hand count the write in votes after polls closed.  In one case, the warden insisted the machines count count write-in votes.  For a couple of them, we had to call Boston's elections department, who called the polling place to tell them they had to count the votes.  One precinct didn't change their mind and decide to count until nearly a half hour after they closed.  And one warden wanted to ask us how to count the votes.

Getting the tallies on election night is always an emotional rollercoaster, as the staff tries to extrapolate from each return.  "Oh no, we're hosed" when a particularly disappointing result from a supportive precinct comes in; then "wow!  now that's a margin!" a bit later when a much better than expected tally comes in from another precinct.  That's normal, but this election night featured an extra element of confusion.  With almost every tally report, I got another story.

In Public View?

The most common trouble was not being allowed to observe the count.  The law describing how to hand-count votes says "the ballot box shall be opened by the presiding officer and the ballots taken therefrom and audibly counted in public view, one by one" [M.G.L. 54-105]  Although the law regarding precincts where machines are used (M.G.L. 54-105A) is not specific about how to hand-count, the intent in section 105 makes sense: people should be allowed to watch the hand count, to see how it's conducted, to ask questions, and to point out ballots for reconsideration if they think something was missed.

We had designated one volunteer each in most of the polling places to do this, but many were unable to.  One was told he had to sit on the opposite side of the auditorium; several were told to wait outside the doors.  Many were allowed to watch, but not stand close enough to see what was on the ballots.  One volunteer who I sent to drive to another polling place in the final half hour because we had nobody else there to observe the count, was able to watch at first, but when he asked questions, he was kicked out.  Poll workers, he said, were very accomodating, welcomed his questions, and tried to do a good job, but a police officer took exception and forced him to leave the premises.

By What Standard?

From the polling places where our volunteers were able to stay inside for the count, we got reports of a wide variety of counting practices.  One polling place, for example, called in two sets of tallies, some time apart.  At first, they had only counted ballots where voters had filled in the oval next to the write-in spot for state senator, but they realized there were a number of ballots with names or stickers in the write-in spot but without that oval filled in, so they decided to count again including those.  It was the right thing to do, but how many other precincts never counted the ballots without filled-in ovals?

We've had some discussions about how Boston might count ambiguous write-in votes.  The standard should be: can you determine the intent of the voter by looking at the ballot?  If you can, count it; if you cannot, don't.  Well, some polling places had a novel approach to the problem: pass the buck.  The report from one polling place, for example, was that they had tallied the ballots that were obviously correct for any of the candidates - sticker affixed in the right place, oval filled in - but set the rest aside in a separate pile.  Rather than try to determine which candidate those ballots were votes for, they simple sealed them and sent them to city hall uncounted.  There were approximately 50 ballots in that pile.

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In meetings before the election, the Chang-Diaz campaign tells me, we were told that a series of trainings was planned for poll wardens.  But on election night, wardens didn't just have different interpretations on the more esoteric matters, but also on simple things like allowing observers to watch the count.  And many weren't even clear on the most basic matter of all: the need to actually count the votes!  The next day, Bonifaz called the elections division to ask what standard poll workers were instructed to use when counting votes.  Boston has not yet provided the answer - not because they don't want to tell us, but because they need to figure out what the answer is so they can give us a truthful answer.  Were all the poll workers and wardens trained to handle this election?  I can't make myself believe that.

If I had to guess the average number of questionable ballots per precinct - ballots not counted, ballots counted by incorrect standards - I would estimate at the very least ten, and possibly as high as 40 or 50.  With 73 precincts, that's a lot of variance.  As things stand now, more than 24 hours after the end of the election, Sonia Chang-Diaz and Diane Wilkerson are separated by just 141 votes out of  about 11,500 tallied.  When all the votes are counted, I would not be surprised if the margin were 1 vote... or 1,000 - for either candidate.

Now is the time for Boston, and Massachusetts, to do the right thing: Count all the votes, using the "intent of the voter" standard uniformly, in a process open to public view, to give us a result both trusted and verified, so we know who was legitimately elected.  Count every vote.