Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty of so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them… This is noble, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.
— Miguel de Cervantes
A full three weeks after the actual vote, the Progressive Party’s gubernatorial primary is over. (Except, perhaps, in the fevered conspiracy dreams of anti-wind dead-enders.) Washington Superior Court Judge Robert Bent* has accepted the final result of the recount: Prog Party chair Martha Abbott 381, write-in Annette Smith 340. The judge said Smith and her allies pointed out a small number of possible irregularities, but none were sufficient to change the outcome.
*Aha! See! Even his name reeks of corruption!
But Smith who, until yesterday, portrayed herself as a reluctant candidate — or maybe not a candidate at all — now plans to continue the race as a write-in. That won’t get her a seat at the gubernatorial debates, except for the Kabuki theater event on October 11 where she and Randy Brock will debate an empty chair. Shades of Clint Eastwood!
In (finally, belatedly) declaring her candidacy, Smith said “If there’s a popular uprising out there, I want to give people a chance to express it.” Sorry to be a cynic, but 340 write-in votes does not constitute a “popular uprising.” She risks throwing cold water on her own movement, should she come out of the November ballot with a small number of votes.
(Actually, she’s probably safe there; elections officials usually don’t even count write-in votes unless they might materially affect the outcome of the race in question. There’s no point, and it’s just a waste of public resources.)
After the jump: a miscount, and a call for moving the primary.
The big change in the final result, by the way, was due to a counting error in the state elections office. As officials rushed to tabulate the write-in votes, one worker mistakenly typed in “58” instead of “5” as Smith’s total in Westfield. State elections director Kathy Scheele dubbed it a consequence of Vermont’s late-August primary, which left her with an extremely tight timeline to meet federal ballot mandates. As a result, her employees put in very long hours.
Scheele also noted that since Westfield borders on Lowell, she thought it plausible that Smith could have actually gotten 58 votes in the town. (One might wonder why Smith supporters, who very carefully reviewed all the tallies for any sign of error, overlooked this one. Methinks they were only looking for mistakes that benefited Smith.)
Because of this whole mess, and because of extremely close votes in 2008 (Salmon/Brock Auditor) and 2010 (the five-way Dem primary for Governor), Scheele and Secretary of State Jim Condos are now calling on the Legislature to move Vermont’s state primary back to May or June. That would give elections officials plenty of time to deal with any eventuality, and it would move the vote out of summer-vacation season.
It would also pound the final nail in the coffin of our traditional conceit that campaign season doesn’t begin until the Legislature adjourns. Which is nonsense, but we do love our traditional conceits, so it’ll be interesting to see if the Legislature takes up the issue. Considering its recent inattention to election and campaign-finance reform, I’m not holding my breath.
“elections officials usually don’t even count write-in votes unless they might materially affect the outcome of the race in question” Just as the conspiritory voices claim, “every vote does not count.”
I disagree. Having been involved in many counts and recounts, most election officials most certainly DO count the write-in votes.
They are a lot less likely to include them in the unofficial results election night, and unless there is a good reason (recount, known declared write-in candidate) they won’t usually dig through the machine tallied ballots looking for write-ins that didn’t fill in the write-in oval, but I’ve seen only a small number of cases where the write-ins weren’t reported in the official tally for the actual names written in, and only a few where they weren’t listed at least as generic write-ins.
The major source of errors seems to be the tally process, when individual counts are combined into totals – both at the clerk level and the statewide level. The one reform that makes the most sense to me is to tighten up the requirements for an actual recount, and allow a lower threshold for a re-tally. Basically checking for math and transcription errors.
I don’t know whom I am more irritated at, Abbot and the Prog ‘leadership’ for pointlessly ceding to that moderate Republican Shumlin, or Smith for doing it last minute, half-assed and taking up valuable time and resources just to fail for not doing it right in he first place.
The results supplied by the Court (or the Secretary of State’s office, I’m still not sure who was responsible) on Monday afternoon did not compare the original vote count and the recount by town or county. Going through them Monday night, here is what changed:
Martha Abbott lost one vote and picked up ten votes.
Annette Smith picked up thirty votes, lost ten votes plus the SOS transcription error where a 5 reported by the town clerk was entered at the SOS office into the database as 58. There was one error where a town reported 9 but AS was credited with 8. That was pointed out to the judge in the hearing on Tuesday morning, but he did not correct that error. So that vote didn’t count even though it was accurately reported.
In addition, in the original count, AS received 5 votes in Hyde Park. In the recount, that number was zero. The tally sheets did not account for those 5 votes (they didn’t show up in other columns) so they just vanished.
Does any of this matter, with so few votes involved? From my ringside seat of the electoral process, this has been a disturbing window into a sloppy process over which the Judge and SOS seem content to make excuses rather than assign or take responsibility.
In my job I coordinate lots of people on lots of issues (I offered to coordinate the shut-down of VY but only if there was a dual track to promote an alternative, which the group making the decisions decided not to do). There really is no excuse for the level of incompetence that we’ve witnessed through this exercise in the democratic process.
Does the Vermont electoral process have integrity? The answer is a definitive NO.
And jvwalt, I don’t know why you continue to throw pot shots at me, but if you want to have a conversation I’d be glad to talk to you. You seem to have a lot of negative opinions about someone who you may actually have a lot in common with.
Your reference to the judge’s name is a bit over the top, making it seem like I made an allegation about him. I now have a laundry list of irregularities in the election process which we can all use to learn from and improve our electoral process. I never made any comments about the Judge. However I did learn after the recount results were finalized on Tuesday that his wife works for Kimbell, Sherman, Ellis, a firm representing GMP that has an interest in seeing me fail. You’d think a forward-looking publication like this one would be more interested in getting corporate interests out of our government rather than attacking someone who has been successfully challenging Vermont corporations for more than a decade.
My big beef with the system is how hard it is to get them to not just count write-in votes correctly but to REPORT them. In the primary, all the write-ins were just lumped together. Thus, on the Dem ballot, there were around 1,200 write-in votes for gov. That’s all they reported! Not so many for Smith, so many for Brock, so many for my mother.
The two parties are obviously the root of the stinking mess that is our national electoral system. Now the Progs run in the primary to crowd out real opponents of the corporate-cozy Dems but drop out in the General Election because they support the Dems.
If the three major parties in Vermont are so many huge disappointments, then we really need the write-in process to function normally which it does not now do.