Election Day errors concern clerks

When Barbara Moore looked at the front page of her morning newspaper last Thursday, she cringed.

“I was, like, ‘Whoa!'” said the longtime Dover-Foxcroft town clerk of a June 29 story on the 2nd Congressional District primary recount between Republicans Kevin Raye and Tim Woodcock.

Moore’s concern came from the fact that, based on the recount, ballot counters there missed 27 votes – more than 10 percent of the two candidates’ totals on Election Day.

“I knew it would concern people, but I also know it can happen,” she said in an interview Monday. “It goes to show that when there is a small margin, candidates are wise to ask for a recount.”

During the four-day recount at the Maine State Police barracks in Augusta, Woodcock gained 82 votes – 19 of which came in Dover-Foxcroft. Raye gained eight votes there.

The disparity helped trim Raye’s lead from 410 to 319 votes. But Woodcock, a former Bangor mayor, pulled the plug on the recount Friday after it became apparent he would not catch the longtime aide to U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe.

In the final count, Raye bested Woodcock 11,861 to 11,542.

Domna Gaitas, spokeswoman for the secretary of state, said Monday that election officials would explore the causes of the discrepancies, but expressed confidence in the state’s elections procedures.

“We will take a look at it,” Gaitas said, noting that of 83 recounts since 1980, only seven have reversed Election Day outcomes. “People are human, but people generally do a good job of handling the ballots.”

Sixty-five percent of the state’s votes are actually counted by optical scan machines, which are 99.5 percent accurate, Gaitas said. The remaining 35 percent of votes are counted by hand.

In Dover-Foxcroft, Moore does have an optical scan machine, although she conceded that the 10-year-old apparatus is “bottom-of-the-barrel type.”

Moore said she was looking forward to inspecting the ballots once they return from Augusta to determine how the errors occurred.

Until that time, however, she had her suspicions, saying that state counters could have allowed improperly marked ballots rejected by both the town’s machine and, upon review, the election clerks there.

In Franklin County, Woodcock didn’t improve on his single vote in Madrid, population 200.

Raye, however, lost nine.

The problem is, he only started with two.

Although town officials reached Monday couldn’t confirm the nature of the error, Raye campaign staffers said it appeared that when the town’s election workers counted the votes, they did so using tally marks instead of numbers.

Seeing two marks next to Raye’s and one next to Woodcock’s, town counters might have mistakenly reported the vote as 11-1.

While the swings in Madrid and Dover-Foxcroft were notable, they paled in comparison to that in the Oxford County town of Paris, where Woodcock’s vote total jumped from 24 to 70.

“I was shocked they were so different,” said Town Clerk Elizabeth Larsen, who, like Moore, was eager for the chance to review the ballots.

Larsen, a 25-year veteran, speculated that counters there might have inadvertently neglected to count votes rejected by the town’s new optical scan machine.

“It’s the only thing I can think of,” she said. “It was a long night.”