Count and Recount – But Still No Accountability

As noted by FBN, the Board of Elec­tions and Ethics allowed the Sep­tem­ber 9 DC pri­mary elec­tion veered off course, some­thing that also occurred in the now-distant Feb­ru­ary national pri­mary. The BOEE Sep­tem­ber 24 dead­line to cer­tify the pri­mary races came and went. And good gov­ern­ment watch­dog, Dorothy Brizill of DCWATCH.com, shared her obser­va­tions of the Board’s attempts to resolve the elec­tion night fiasco.

“Last week, BOEE’s interim exec­u­tive direc­tor, Sylvia Goldsberry-Adams, with the approval of the elec­tions board, con­ducted what was billed as an ‘audit’ of the Sep­tem­ber elec­tion returns.” She related that for two days, start­ing on Sep­tem­ber 18, Adams and BOEE staffers man­u­ally counted the paper bal­lots from four pre-selected precincts (13, 21, 22, and 44) of the District’s 144 total. This man­ual count was com­pared with the totals reported from the elec­tion­night car­tridges con­tain­ing opti­cally scanned paper bal­lots in those precincts.

The audit did not go smoothly. In Precinct 21, there were nine­teen races (out of sev­enty total races) in which the man­ual count of the votes cast did not match the machine tab­u­la­tions for those races, for a dis­crep­ancy rate of 27 per­cent. For all four sam­ple precincts, the BOEE staff had to repeat­edly recount the paper bal­lots (in the case of Precinct 13, more than ten recounts were done) in an
effort to get man­ual results that approx­i­mated the opti­cal machine count of those same paper bal­lots. As Brizill noted, “By the time I left BOEE’s offices on Fri­day after­noon, votes were still being recounted manually.”

The morn­ing of “elec­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion day (Sep­tem­ber 24),” Brizill con­tin­ues, “the DC BOEE held a pub­lic hear­ing for the pur­pose of cer­ti­fy­ing elec­tion results from the pri­mary, pur­suant to DC Code. The meet­ing was espe­cially sig­nif­i­cant since, prior to the hear­ing, the Board and its staff had refused to explain or respond to inquiries regard­ing the irreg­u­lar­i­ties that occurred dur­ing the pri­mary. This included thou­sands of write-in votes that were ini­tially tab­u­lated and reported at 9:35 p.m. on elec­tion night, but which had mirac­u­lously dis­ap­peared from the final returns reported by the Board
at midnight.”

Despite pub­lic con­cern, includ­ing cit­i­zens attend­ing the hear­ing, the Board con­tin­ued its stonewalling. Goldsberry-Adams asked the BOEE to post­pone cer­ti­fy­ing the elec­tion results until a hand-tally was done of the paper votes that had been cast at the Ward 2 Reeves Cen­ter Precinct 141. This was the precinct where most of the phan­tom votes had appeared, sup­pos­edly as a result of one vot­ing machine’s mal­func­tion­ing car­tridge. The Board autho­rized the hand tab­u­la­tion but with the count­ing still incom­plete at 4:45 p.m., the recount was halted and the Board meet­ing was recon­vened only to give a fur­ther exten­sion of time, Brizill reported.

The recount recom­menced Thurs­day morn­ing, with cer­ti­fi­ca­tion sched­uled for 2:00 p.m. Dur­ing the recon­vened after­noon meet­ing, Golds­berry– Adams tried to mis­lead the Board and the pub­lic by stat­ing that the ini­tial results of the recount of Precinct 141 showed a “match” with the returns reported by the Board on elec­tion night in at least ten of the elec­tion races. “How­ever, Goldsberry-Adams failed to note that the ‘match’ was only among the results of the hand counts of the paper bal­lots done by three tab­u­la­tors that after­noon, not between those hand counts and the elec­tion­night results reported by the precinct’s touch-screen vot­ing machine and opti­cal scan machine that reads the paper bal­lots,” Brizill concluded.

On Fri­day morn­ing, the BOEE declared the pri­mary offi­cially cer­ti­fied. FBN is at a loss to explain what the socalled “sam­ple” recount has changed to make the results any more valid than they were on Sep­tem­ber 9. The BOEE has like­wise failed to respond at any level to the other reported dis­crep­an­cies and irreg­u­lar­i­ties that occurred on pri­mary day. Appar­ently the advo­cates of a “world class city” don’t see that the BOEE is cur­rently oper­at­ing as a “third world agency”—one that has repeat­edly failed the vot­ers of DC, Ward 2 in particular.

It is crit­i­cally impor­tant for our lead­ers to con­tinue the reform of our city gov­ern­ment, and to demand an imme­di­ate and full Ward 2 pri­mary recount. It is clearly the appro­pri­ate and respon­si­ble civic action. This must include a total of all pri­mary voter sig­na­tures in the reg­is­ter that is then rec­on­ciled with touch-screen and paper bal­lots. Any­thing less is mean­ing­less. — FBN