Report from the Counting Table

by Monica Smith [courtesy of Blog for America]

Yesterday, I participated in the hand re-count of New Hampshire presidential primary ballots as an observer. For those looking for a comprehensive analysis of the results, sorry to disappoint, but ballot counters don't get to see the whole picture and we didn't get to see the totals from the other seven groups.

Yes, there were eight groups of ballot counters. Each group had two counters, individuals hired by the Sec. of State on a per diem basis because of their familiarity with the process (there are recounts annually for some of the legislative or town elections), who were observed by at least two volunteer observers from the campaigns. Actually, I was only aware of Kucinich and Clinton people, but only Kucinich is paying for this exercise.

The group I was in did two voting precincts totaling about 2000 ballots. First we watched the separation of ballots as they were taken out of the "sealed" boxes the election supervisors had forwarded (cardboard boxes of various sizes that were sealed with packing tape and had a certifying placcard with official signatures attached so they had to be cut to open the box. The ballots are on stock of various thicknesses, even among the official ballots. Some places obviously ran out of Democratic ballots and ran some off on xerox machines of regular paper which couldn't be counted by the opti-scans and had to be hand counted at the voting place. Because they'd already been counted by hand, they tended to already be sorted by party and saved us some time. But, because the paper is thin, they're more difficult to count by hand. Many of the ballots as they came out of the boxes were rather bent and wrinkled and one suspects that running them back throught the opti-scans for a machine re-count would not work real well.