You would think that making sure every ballot is counted would be a basic function of our Secretary of State. But apparently that’s not the case in a corrupt one party state like ours where not counting them helps the party in power. We now have it in writing, the SOS’s office has fully acknowledged that a number of voters in Rowley had their ballots discarded - and SOS seems perfectly fine with that.
For those who didn’t read the full account of what happened at the Rowley recount following the election last November you can read that here.
In a nutshell, the recount there ended with no change in the vote and I was on my way of winning my race for State Representative by just four votes. While election workers were packing up to leave, lawyers for my opponent, Kristen Kassner (D-Hamilton), demanded to look at a pile of spoiled ballots. Somehow, they determined that at least ten of them were improperly spoiled because they were rejected by vote counting machines, and with their candidate down by four votes they wanted to count them…or at least count five of them.
Our laws require that ballots rejected by voting machines be hand counted, and while this happened in every other town in the district it did not happen in Rowley. It was likely an honest mistake and election workers there acknowledged in their written minutes that it was their practice to spoil rejected ballots and not count them.
Workers on my side objected to counting them, citing Mass Gen Law, Ch 54, Section 103 which specifically states that “(t)he supreme judicial and superior courts shall have jurisdiction in equity….to order the counting of any ballot improperly rejected…”
This is where corrupt one party rule rears its ugly head. A phone call was made to the SOS office to get a ruling on how to proceed and it was handled by Trudy Reid, who has a history of partisan corruption and yet was somehow deputized into running the Rowley recount. We don’t know who she spoke to at SOS, and we don’t know what she was instructed to do. In all likelihood she was probably told to count all of the rejected ballots because they’re all legal votes. Or maybe she was told to not count any of them because MGL, as stated above, clearly states that only a judge can unspoil ballots.
One thing I’m sure she was not told was to allow the candidate down by four votes to only unspoil five of them - which is exactly what happened. Kassner’s lawyers were allowed to sift through the ten rejected ballots and pull out just five of them, all of which had votes for Kassner. This led to her one vote victory.
Certainly, you may think, a court would look at this and not allow the stuff of banana republics to decide an election here, and that would be the case in a normal state where partisan corruption is kept in check. But this is Massachusetts, and we ended up before Judge Thomas Dreschler where it was clear from the beginning that we were not going to get a fair hearing. In fact we didn't get any hearing at all as Dreschler decided that the matter was not in the court’s jurisdiction, despite the state’s own lawyers telling him that it was. Regardless, it was kicked over to the House of Representatives.
House Speaker Ron Mariano (D-Quincy) convened a Special House Committee to make a determination and made one of his loyalists, Michael Day (D-Stoneham), the Chair. Day called for a hearing of all candidates with contested elections and, after just a couple hours of pretending to hear us, asked everyone if we would accept whatever the Special Committee decides after they were done with their investigation. Every candidate said that they would, and then he proceeded to not do any investigation at all.
Beacon Hill is a small and insular place, and despite its infamous secrecy there are few real secrets. My sources there tell me that angry partisans got in Mariano’s face and in his ear, demanding that he seat the Democrats immediately, and after several weeks of no discussion the Committee decided to do just that.
House Minority Leader Brad Jones (R-North Reading) filed a bill to open the contested ballots and it went before a vote of the full House, but it was shot down on a straight party line, because apparently this
isn’t enough. Democrats won’t be satisfied until every red dot is flipped to blue. The only Democrat to cross party lines was Russell Holmes (D-Boston) who joined Republicans in trying to make sure every vote got counted. Pretty ironic vote from the party that claims to be concerned about vote suppression and disenfranchisement.
We tried for months to get a conversation with Secretary Of State Bill Galvin (D-Brighton) to discuss this and several other serious issues in our election system. Our elections are mostly secure, but we have obvious issues with the way we do mail in balloting, and this came up in my race as well as the race between Andrew Shepherd and Margaret Scarsdale. There were also chain of custody issues in Ipswich where ballots were put in an unsecure box, and where 14 ballots mysteriously appeared during the recount that were not there on election night. Galvin refuses to answer any calls or emails, leaving it to his Director and Legal Counsel Michelle Tassinari to cover for him.
Galvin is our longest serving Secretary of State, holding that office for almost 30 years now. He never seems to get any real challenge from either party so it’s not surprising that he doesn’t seem to care about this and other serious problems in our election system. But it’s his job to weed out partisan and corrupt election workers like Trudy Reid and to make sure every vote is counted. He should do his job.
It keeps getting worse. As long as apathetic Republican voters don't vote we will continue to experience tyrannical behavior from our State government.
Every vote counts, but only if you count every vote.