Place your bets here. How many votes will change tomorrow?
A couple of weeks ago we elected out new crop of City Councillors. Two of those races were very close. In Ward 5 Kathy Winter lost to Bill Humphrey by 34 votes, but that was 34 votes just in Ward 5.
In the Ward 6 at-large race Alicia Bowman beat Greg Schwartz by 30 votes, but that was a city-wide election. It was 30 votes out of approximately 16,000 votes cast across the city. Greg Schwartz has requested an official recount which will be conducted tomorrow.
Ever since the Bush-Gore recount that put the phrase “hanging chad” into our collective consciousness I’ve been really curious about the mechanics of how a recount works. I’ve signed up as a volunteer for my friend Alicia Bowman for tomorrow’s recount so I’ll have an inside view of the whole process.
I went to a training class tonight – so here’s an abbreviated version of how it all works. Tomorrow morning the paper ballots will be loaded into a vehicle and driven to the Cabot School with a police escort at about 8 AM. The 16000+ ballots will be counted out into blocks of 50 ballots. At about 9:30, the recount will begin. Blocks of 50 ballots will be distributed to each table. Each table will have a pair of election officials – a reader, and a counter. Each official reader and counter may have a volunteer from each campaign shadowing them. The reader will pull the first ballot out and read the vote. Every ballot will by definition have two votes – Danberg, Schwartz, Bowman, blank or write-in. The reader will read the two votes, announce them and the counter will record them. The vast majority of ballots will be very straightforward and unambiguous. Along the way though there will be occasional ballots with some level of ambiguity. On those ballots, the reader will read his two votes. On either side one of the campaign volunteers from either campaign may raise their hand and say “I object”. In that case, election officials and lawyers for both campaigns will descend, confer and render a decision about that ballot based on case law and precedent.
Going into this I was thinking how ambiguous can a vote be? You fill out a circle beside the chosen candidate.
At tonight’s training they said the vast majority of ballots are 100% unambiguous but that you would be amazed at the variety of different ways that a specific ballot can be ambiguous.
- Two votes and a write-in for Mickie Mouse
- Candidate circle not filled in but written in instead “e.g Danberg”
- No candidate circles filled in, but a candidate’s name circled with a marker
- No candidate circles filled in, but a check mark halfway between two candidate’s names
- etc
The most general rule that applies are that if there is an obvious intent by the voter than the vote is counted that way. Of course, with the infinite variety of ways people can screw this up, there is an established body of case law to determine how each of these cases are handled.
So here’s today’s contest: At the moment, pre-recount, Alicia Bowman is leading Greg Schwartz by 30 votes. At the end of the recount, how many votes will that have changed by?
I’ll go first: Based on absolutely nothing I’m going to say that there will be a change of 5 votes.
Closest guess wins Village14-wide acclaim for your political/statistical acumen and the beverage of your choice at the upcoming Bloggers Ball. In the event of a tie, guessing the direction of the movement will be the tie-breaker.
What I’m most looking forward to tomorrow is resolving a mystery that I noticed on election night. In virtually every city-wide race there were somewhere between 80 -150 write-in votes. This is aside from the declared write-in campaigns. When I asked people about this they’ve said yeah people write-in all kinds of crazy things. I’m looking forward to cataloging the one’s I come across.
My guess is that Alicia wins by a margin of 31.
PS: here’s an interesting story of trying to interpret a voter’s intent:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/politics/virginia-house-of-delegates-one-vote-yancey-simonds/index.html
Alicia wins by 27
I’d be more inclined to trust the machine count than the human count in case there is a difference. Why on earth are we doing this?
I would have done a hand count and a machine count for double accuracy.
I was there @8:40 for the first 9:00 AM session, but we had to had to wait at least 2 -1/2 hours to begin! ???
My first time at a recount but it seemed to me to be quite disorganized. ???
With all of us hundreds of political wonks in attendance I wonder how many there came by foot or bicycle.
Isn’t that supposed to be the preferred mode of transportation these days ?
Oh I forgot,… Or took the MBTA bus?
It was well organized on the city side and by both candidates from what I could see (what would you expect from David Olsen, Alicia Bowman, and Greg Schwartz?!). However, wonky as the crowd might have been, it was a first time event for most and there were a lot of questions. Once the recount began, it appeared – or appears as is still going on at 4:00 – to move along smoothly.
Recount was scheduled to begin at 10, didn’t actually start until 11:30, but at least some of that time counsel was giving instructions. Aside from the slight delay, felt pretty smooth to me.
@ Blueprintbill, at least one of us who volunteered today (yours truly!) took the MBTA *and* walked. This morning I rode the #553 bus from Newton Corner to Newtonville (and walked 8 minutes from the bus stop at Washington & Harvard Streets to Cabot School), and this afternoon I walked home to Newton Corner via Cabot Street and Waverley Ave.
I just got back (6:30). I stuck around for a a good while after the counting was finished in hopes of getting the final result. Eventually I realized the end wasn’t imminent and bailed out.
As I understand it (very imperfectly) there were still a few issues not yet resolved. It sound like there was an outstanding question of whether one block of 50 ballots was unaccounted for. When I left they were tracking that down. Also there are potential issues with absentee ballots – how specific absentee ballots are counted as late and discarded. Finally there are some questions about provisional ballots.
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“provisional ballots” were news to me. If you ever go to vote and get turned down for any reason, you can and should request a provisional ballot – they must by law give you one. Say for example you turned up to vote and you were not on voting list. You would fill out provisional ballot that would be notated with the reason it was possibly invalid. After the fact those ballots and the details around them would be investigated to determine whether or not they should be counted.
I must say that despite the mind numbing tedium of counting 1000’s of ballots, there was something civilly heartwarming to see a gymnasium of 150+ people donating their Saturday to insuring that our most basic civil right was free, fair, and accurate.
It’s still not too late to place your bet.
My take away was that non-mayoral-year municipal voters are pretty darn good at carefully filling in black circles. I only saw one “small single faint dot” ballot that, while having very clear intent, would likely be missed by a machine.
@Jerry, I couldn’t agree more! It was a great experience.
Greg Schwartz has conceded. The counts were
7504 – Danberg
6778 – Bowman
6749 – Schwartz
Alicia Bowman’s lead dropped one vote from 30 to 29 in the recount.
David Hruska is our winner. He correctly predicted a one vote change (though he did predict in the other direction)
I’m flattered, but isn’t Fignewtonville the winner? We were both off by two, but Fig’s prediction was in the right direction.
I don’t think so. My question was how many votes will change? You answered 1. Figgy answered 3.
It looks like there were 30 to 40 missing votes for each candidate in the previous results. Where did all those votes come from?
Oh, OK, I see what you mean now. Guess I’ll have to attend the Bloggers Ball to pick up my prize 🙂
Jerry – it was actually 76 ballots that were missing but found in a bag of “unused ballots” at City Hall.
What a great experience to work with people on all sides to ensure that every vote counts. While we may have been on different sides, I hope we’ll all be together again for the Presidential election!
@Newtoner – I think the difference between the results tonight and the results reported on election day are due to overseas and provisional ballots that were counted after election day. Quoting from an email Mayor Fuller had sent out on November 15:
“On election night, the results showed that Schwartz received 6,712 votes, 30 short of Alicia Bowman who received 6,742. Schwartz is a sitting councilor, one of the two at-large councilors from Ward 6. The other, Vicki Danberg, presumably retained her seat with 7,460 votes.
As usual, after election night, a number of additional ballots were counted. These additional ballots include overseas ballots that can arrive up to ten days after the election and the ballots of people who voted provisionally on election day (i.e., their registration had to be double checked). Coincidentally, the updated vote count still is exactly a difference of 30 votes: Schwartz received 6,748 votes, 30 short of Bowman who received 6,778. Vicki Danberg’s vote count grew to 7,495.”
The results are remarkably close to the hand recount.
Congrats to Alicia! It was fun being part of the recount this morning and really heartened/thankful that we have the ability to do a hand recount and then when doing so the results were extremely close to the results of the optical scanners. It should give us all confidence in the way we vote here in MA. Great process, great job by both teams and the city to run a pretty congenial recount process today!