Urgent call: all five candidates support recount, solicit volunteers. Please volunteer ASAP

Quick e-mail from the Shumlin campaign, signed by all five candidates (I’m assuming this went out to the other campaigns as well) indicating that if you want to volunteer for the recount, you can do so via this link.  It asks basic information (including who you supported in the primary to get a balanced recount team) and your district, etc.  

The recount officially starts September 8th, so time is of the essence.

Per the e-mail:

Judge Crawford has informed us that the primary election recount will begin on Wednesday, September 8th. We need your help to make this process go as quickly as possible. The judge has asked that we submit a list of volunteers by Friday morning (September 3rd). We will need 40 volunteers from each county to complete the recount.

Each county clerk will oversee a recount team, who will be responsible for counting all of the ballots in that county. Normally, each candidate would recruit their own volunteers in each county, but in order to make this process happen as quickly as possible, all five of us have agreed to put out the call generally and nominate the volunteers together.

The more volunteers we can recruit in each county, the faster the recount can be completed. Please help if you can, especially if you have experience with elections or if you are on the Board of Civil Authority. Once we have a list of volunteers, we will submit them to Judge Crawford, so the process can begin on time. If you know people who might be interested in volunteering, please forward this email to them.

This is urgent folks: those of us who are concerned about how long a recount will take should be the first to sign up, if at all possible.  

Information not yet known: are you able to volunteer for a single day or do you have to volunteer for the entire recount?  Is there a screening process?

Regardless, please volunteer if you can.  The sooner we can get this completed, the sooner we can get to the work of taking Dubie down come November.

26 thoughts on “Urgent call: all five candidates support recount, solicit volunteers. Please volunteer ASAP

  1. After I signed up to volunteer I asked others around the office if they were interested and a co-worker of mine had a great question. Will the recount happen in each of our counties or are we volunteering to travel to Washington county to count?

  2. Let me expand on my remarks so that all members of the Vermont Democratic Party, the press and other interested onlookers will understand.

    #1: We won’t be able to get started until 2 full weeks after the primary ended. I’ve thought about this and decided that as long as the recount is over 3 or even 4 weeks after the primary it will still be more or less before the old primary date, so it really doesn’t matter that this gets dragged out because we want to be sure that the volunteers do a better job counting the ballots than the local justices of the peace and town clerks.

    #2: The judge is going to demand that we show up in each county courthouse with 10 teams of 4 people each, so we’re going to need 40 volunteers per county. I’ve asked VT Democratic Party Exec Director Robert Dempsey to coordinate the volunteers and there will be a website up tomorrow. All the other candidates are joining me in sending out an email asking for volunteers.

    #3: I’ve discussed this with the Vermont Democratic Party Executive Committee and the other candidates and we all agree that there are well over 520 active volunteers in the party who won’t mind giving up a day or two to recount the votes instead of working the phones, going door to door, arranging fundraisers, etc. After all, we have tens of thousands of VT Democrats who are signed up on the Town Committees.

    #4: I have poured over the election results and have to say that nothing looks out of line with the results we have in hand right now, so I’m going to have to be pretty lucky to pull this off. I think the odds are something like one in ten million if the recount merely turns up random counting errors.

    #5: I just owe it to some of my more disappointed supporters to put the party through this. Keeping those two or three hundred happy as opposed to ticking off tens of thousands of fellow VT Democrats seems an even trade to me.

  3. Julie

    As you know for politicians (as for lawyers) words mean everything.  Unless I missed it, all 5 candidates never stated that they “support recount”.  I believe both Deb and Pete stated that they supported the legal right to request a recount. http://bit.ly/cjOvjF

    Shumlin – “I understand that Doug is going to exercise his legal right to a recount and I respect his decision.”

    Markowitz – “Although it was not my intention to initiate a recount, I respect Doug’s right to do so under the law,”

    Supporting Doug’s right to request a recount is different then supporting the recount itself.

    There is a huge distinction.  I know Doug to be a reasonable person and would urge his supporters to contact him as soon as possible to encourage him to withdraw his petition at the court hearing tomorrow 9/3/10.

    Best,

    Ed

  4. So I registered to volunteer by clicking the link as soon as I read this GMD post and have not heard back. When can I expect a phone call? And the recount is to start on Wednesday…

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