LOCAL NEWS: THE NO ACCOUNT RECOUNT

Now is the Spring of our discontent....

Haik Bedrosian/BurlingtonPol.com had it first about Kurt Wright's call to end the IRV Mayoral Recount. The reasons for stopping the count last night are given in today's Burlington Free Press/Briggs story.

City Councilor Kurt Wright called off a recount Tuesday night and conceded his instant-runoff loss to Burlington Mayor Bob Kiss.

With about half of the wards tabulated, Wright congratulated Kiss on his victory and asked for the recount to be halted, Chief Administrative Officer Jonathan Leopold said late Tuesday.

Leopold said that with about 43 percent of the votes recounted, the difference between the hand count and the March 3 machine count was about five votes.

“It was clear that the totals were coming in so accurately compared to the machine count that it wasn’t going to affect the outcome,” Leopold said.

Wright said earlier in the day that he requested the recount, “not for me, but at the request of a tremendous amount of citizens who really strongly urged me to do it. I was ready to move on.”

Wright, a Republican, lost to Kiss by a final margin of 252 votes, 4,313 to 4,061 on March 3. That difference amounted to 2.8 percent of the 8,976 valid ballots cast, well within the 5 percent difference in votes established by the Legislature as the threshold for recounts. Only 27 percent of registered voters participated in the election.

Wright called for the recount, in part, to test the accuracy of the instant-runoff system that propelled Kiss, a Progressive, to re-election.

“I hope the recount will confirm the integrity of the process and give citizens a level of comfort with how the system works,” he said.

Huh?

This report doesn't jive with Wright's email to Haik last Friday:--

... I do agree with people like yourself Haik who believe this is the right opportunity to take a close look at how the system worked. This is not about me, it is about the process. I accept the result and am gratified to have come so close...

If Kurt had already accepted the results of the vote on March 3, why did he concede last night? He didn't think the recount would change the outcome. Clearly in his email to Haik, he wanted the recount to test the process. But how can we be contented with the process when when the recount was called off before completion? 43% is not "about half."

“It was clear that the totals were coming in so accurately compared to the machine count that it wasn’t going to affect the outcome,” Leopold said.

When the recount was halted, we were told that the difference was 5 votes. How can it be claimed that "the totals were coming in so accurately"? How does this compare to other recounts when an IRV recount has never before happened in Burlington? The votes from Wards 4 and 7 have been left uncounted; it is from these wards where Kurt received most support. Why weren't those crucial votes recounted?

BURLINGTON MAYORAL ELECTION INTEGRITY STILL AT STAKE

We still have to see if the Burlington election officials' training scheduled for February 24 will include what was missing in the previous training to make the City Election 2009 run smoothly and without a hitch.

BURLINGTON MAYORAL ELECTION INTEGRITY AT STAKE

On the face of it, the recent Burlington Free Press story is a non-story, but certainly a last-ditch effort at dirty politics in an otherwise uneventful campaign. Tempers escalated in the Burlington mayoral campaign this week when a Bob Kiss surrogate - the city's Chief Administrative Officer Leopold - accused Democratic candidate Andy Montroll of a conflict of interest in his role as a member of the city council's finance committee. Mr Montroll was pissed - rightly so; meanwhile Mayor Kiss stood idly by and said it was a "misunderstanding." A few have judged the merits of the Briggs story, but the damage has been done. Voters will decide anyway on March 3rd in the Instant Run-off Voting mayoral city election.

Sadly. however, there is a bigger problem than the hijinks of a political campaign.

Much greater concern to Burlington voters is this: the choice for the next mayor of Burlington may be decided for them before they've even had a opportunity to vote. There are serious technical, procedural and ethical questions about how the city will handle the mayoral IRV election. Voters will have two ballots, one is IRV for mayor and the other is for referendum items and other candidate races. After voting, each will be deposited by voters in separate voting machines. Normally, at the start and end of voting, election officials are required to sign off on a print out from the voting tabulator machine, at the beginning to show that the machine's "memory card" is at "zero," and at the end to show the number of votes cast. That will happen with the non-mayoral ballots, but won't be possible with the IRV ballots. And that's the big deal about this election. A important step in accounting for the integrity of the election will not happen, as described by Owen Mulligan, Ward Clerk for Ward 6, in an email he sent to two reporters at Seven Days newspaper [my emphasis in bold]:--

Subject: Mayoral Election Concerns

Ken and Shay,

I'm writing to you because as an election official in Ward 6 I have a concern about the way this election will be handled. Last time we had an IRV election, I was not a Ward Clerk but I believe the issue was probably the same then and for some reason no one brought it up or maybe they did...I don't know.

Anyway, my intention here with this email is just to let you know what my concern is and then if you feel it warrants further investigation or reporting, then so be it.

I will try to explain, but this is not easy to do non-verbally so hopefully you will get the point I'm trying to make:

At the polls and before we open them for voting, we always check each tabulator machine to make sure there are no ballots in the ballot box..that is for the actual ballot box that holds the paper ballots and also the electronic ballot box being the "memory card" that is sealed into the tabulator machine.

To check the memory card to make sure there are no electronic votes on the card we do an opening print out which will have all the races and all the candidates being at zero showing there are no votes cast. We then as election officials sign off on this print out from the machine if all races are pre-set at zero votes. This is an important print out..all the elected officials must sign off on it. We do this for every election and for every tabulator machine that is used.

My concern is, and I do not feel comfortable as an election official running the election this way, is that on the IRV machine I have been informed that we will not be able to do a print out or even an end of night print out from the machine at the polls. So essentially a huge step in the process of election integrity has been removed and centralized at City Hall. The way it is now, I'm supposed to turn on the machine and have people vote without ever being able to get a print out letting me know that the races are pre-set to zero votes on the memory card.

City Hall does a check on each memory card before they are sealed just like every election before they are delivered to each polling location, the difference this time is we are not able to do that print out at each polling location and check the "electrnoc ballot box" to make sure the races are pre-set at zero. There is nothing for us to sign off on and we are supposed to blindly trust the memeory card that City Hall has provided us. I do not feel this is responsible and it does not sit well with me. I'm going to have a bad taste in my mouth for the whole election day. I just can't ignore the fact that a whole step has been removed because the machines do not have the technology to do a print out for IRV programming.

If either of you feel like dicussing this or feel that it warrents any attention please let me know. I think the voters deserve to know and steps should be taken to make sure the next time we have an IRV election that print outs will be possible. At this point in time and esp. with all the issues Burlington has had with elections, we should not be removing steps in the process of election integrity.

I absolutely support IRV, but I do not support the way the city is running the IRV election. The technology to do print outs is somehting that should have been checked into before we ever made a transition to IRV or if that technology is available then why don't we have it?.

Owen Mulligan
Ward 6 Clerk

Owen tells me that Shay Totten responded in a disinterested email that he would not pursue Owen's concerns in a 7D story; Ken Picard has at yet not replied.

Something is indeed rotten at Election Central, 139 Church Street, Burlington, Vermont. Burlington voters should be enraged as I am that the integrity of our City Election 2009 is at stake.

VERMONTERS DIVIDED OVER USE OF VOTING MACHIINES

BURLINGTON FREE PRESS

RUTLAND — Since the 2006 election when human error prompted a recount and reversal of Vermont’s election for auditor, 30 more Vermont communities now have vote-tabulating machines bringing the total to 103.

But some communities still favor tradition over technology and will continue to hand-count the results in Tuesday’s election.