6th Worcester District Recount Update

Peter Cooper Jr.

November 23, 2010 (Last Modified: November 23, 2010)

Following up on my prior post, Oxford’s recount, just like the other towns other than Southbridge, came up with the same exact result as election night. Alicea’s going to bring the election to court. The main issue is an absentee ballot in Southbridge that was in the “spoiled ballots” envelope, marked for Alicea. The spoiled ballots envelope is for if one is at the polls and makes a mistake marking one’s ballot, one can bring it back to a poll worker, who puts it in the spoiled ballots envelope and gives you a new ballot. There’s no reason for an absentee ballot to be in that envelope. The ballot in question is marked as having been run through the voting machine, but rejected by it. So, did a poll worker write out a new ballot for this person and put it in to let the person’s vote count, and thus this person’s vote has already been counted? Or did the poll worker just put the ballot rejected by the machine in the spoiled pile, and thus it still needs to be counted? Nobody seems to know, and it seems that the Board of Registrars in Southbridge decided just to not count it and let the courts figure it out (2–1, on party lines, of course).

Even if the courts do accept and count the ballot, there are other votes that Durant lost in the recount that he thinks might end up in his favor, plus there were all the ballot box issues in Southbridge. My father, who attended several recounts on behalf of the Durant campaign, said that Southbridge was just “chaos” compared to the other towns, and that Southbridge took 7 hours to count less ballots than Charlton counted in 3 hours.

So, it should be an interesting court case to watch.