I skipped out of school today to go up to the St. Albans’ District Court (no, it’s not what you’re thinking) to help out with the recounting of votes in the Democratic primary for governor.

I figure I’ll get the opportunity to sit through dozens of lectures on Roman History and Modern Poetry, but how often does a state-wide recount take place? (Recent history suggests every two years, but I think that the reality is much less often)

Now, the first thing that stuck me as I entered the room was that, apparently, there are were not a lot of youth jumping at this once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity.  At age 21, I could have been safely considered the grandson of almost any one of the other volunteers there, and maybe the great-grandson of a few.

And while there were about forty folks in the room, it seemed that most everyone knew most everyone else.  Greetings ranged from inquisitions about the well-being of the family, to inquisitions about the well-being of the farm, to passed-down bastardizations of bonjour.

The whole operation was slow to start: The official start time of 9 AM passed and the organization process started around 9:30.

The crew was divided up, with two groups of four working each of the tabulators (to count up the scanned ballots) and three groups of four at tables counting by hand. There were a few volunteers appointed to walk around and supervise, as well as a few who were tasked with opening ballot bags and distributing the ballots to the counters.

Now, it was a complex process that took  a while to get off the ground, but the situation demanded the utmost care, lest even one vote be counted twice or even one vote not be counted at all.

For the hand-counters, only one town would be open at a time.  Until all the ballots from that town were counted and put away, another town’s bag could not be opened.

The first step with each bag was to sort out the Democratic ballots from the Republican and Progressive ballots, which was something that had been handled before by whoever counted the votes to begin with, but which we checked over again to ensure no errors.

The number of Democratic ballots was added up, to ensure that we had as many as the town had reported as cast.  As we counted, we grouped the ballots into stacks of fifty.

Each table of four was then given a stack of fifty and two tabulation sheets.  The pair on one side of the table would go through the ballots, reading off the vote for governor one at a time, one passing the ballot to the other, and waiting for confirmation before moving on to the next ballot.  The pair on the other side of the table would be marking off the confirmed votes on the tabulation sheets.

When all fifty ballots were tabulated, the recording pair would compare sheets: Any discrepancies? Recount the stack.

If both volunteers had the same numbers, then all four would sign the tally sheets and the two pairs would switch positions: Those who had tallied would check the ballots and those who had checked the ballots would tally.  Thus each stack of fifty votes was counted and checked twice.

Then the four tally sheets, all concurring, would go off to be checked against one another, and then added to a master tally, which was checked again.  All told, the numbers from the sheets were checked by at least four different people, as well as against the three other tally sheets.

I regret not taking any pictures of the scene  there; with weathered Vermonters hunched over ballots and sheets of paper, it looked like Norman Rockwell had painted the SATs. Quite a sight.

All told, it took us about 4 hours to complete the whole recount in Franklin county.  I’m not sure how it turned out (if anyone went up or if anyone went down) but the last word was that it was pretty close to the previous total.