In the tiny seaside town of Long Island, Maine — and for the national media that followed it — it was an inscrutable mystery fit for Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher. Except that it wasn’t murder at the heart of this mystery, it was a potentially ‘stolen’ election, which, upon additional investigation, has now been ‘unstolen’, with the state Senate candidate rightfully elected by the people of Maine’s District 25 finally set to take her seat in the state legislature after another dramatic turn of events this week.
We recently detailed the fascinating story of 21 “phantom ballots”, all cast for Republican state Senate candidate Cathleen Manchester, which, when reportedly “discovered” during a November 18th recount of the very close Maine Senate race, ended up flipping the results from the slim victory Democratic candidate Catherine Breen thought she had achieved on Election Night to a “win” for her GOP opponent.
The tantalizing mystery in the town of Long Island included 171 ballots tallied by hand there on the night of the November 4th election and the same number of voters confirmed to have voted in the town’s official Voter Manifest, either by absentee ballot or at the tiny town’s only polling place.
Like the public hand-count of all the town’s ballots at the end of Election Night, Long Island’s only polling place was overseen all day by its Town Clerk Brenda Singo (who, over the past week or so, had strangely, yet repeatedly refused to answer what we thought were fairly simple, straightforward queries from The BRAD BLOG about the town’s precinct-based Election Night hand-count and the chain of custody process thereafter for its hand-marked paper ballots.)
During the recount of paper ballots in the seven towns comprising Maine’s Senate District 25, however, a funny thing happened. 21 “new” ballots showed up in Long Island, all for the Republican Manchester, resulting in her being certified as the “winner” of the recount overseen by the Secretary of State’s office and the Democratic Breen’s subsequent contest of the recount results falling to the Republican-majority state Senate to be investigated and ultimately decided there.
Before the Special Committee, comprised of four Republicans and three Democrats, could convene, the outcome didn’t look good for the Democrats. The GOP majority “provisionally seated” Manchester, despite strenuous objections from state Dems.
The resolution of the mystery on Tuesday, however — which resulted in one state official declaring “I’d eat my hat if I had one” — has flipped the final results back to the Democrat once again, cleared the Town Clerk Singo and other election officials of further suspicion and, as we noted in our original report, underscored once again the undeniable fact that hand counting hand-marked paper ballots at the precinct on Election Night is the most reliable and publicly overseeable way of assuring that election results actually reflect the true intent of the voters…
Hand-counting vindicated
On Tuesday at Maine’s State House in Augusta, the Senate’s Special Committee held a “jam-packed” hearing, according to the Portland Press Herald’s Steve Mistler, initially spending hours interviewing state and local election officials and other witnesses.
“Nearly 30 witnesses had been called to testify, including all of the election officials from Long Island who had been pulled into the controversy,” the paper reports.
Then, following lengthy questions for and testimony by Deputy Sec. of State Julie Flynn who had overseen and signed off on the November 18th recount, the Committee did what they should have simply done in the first place, and what might have been done at the recount itself, had it not been blocked by Republicans: Flynn and a detective from the state Attorney General’s office publicly hand counted all of Long Island’s ballots again.
The Bangor Daily News’ Mario Moretto reported the “dramatic turn of events” that happened next this way:
The next batch, designated “Lot A1,” should have had 50 ballots, according to the tally sheet — 28 for Breen, 21 for Manchester, and one blank. However, when it was opened, Manchester’s votes were missing.
Flynn immediately offered an explanation: Manchester’s ballots from Lot A1 had been counted twice. She said it’s likely the ballots were erroneously put into the next lot before the first was properly put away, and then “rediscovered” as new ballots.
Moretto reports “The room fell silent as the news sank in for the partisan staffers and Long Island residents in attendance.” It was a simple case of the same set of ballots mistakenly being counted twice during the recount.
“I believe (the error) happened in the recount, and I’m chagrined to say so,” Flynn admitted. “I’d eat my hat, if I had one.”
The new recount, Bangor Daily News explains, “showed exactly the results indicated by officials in Long Island on Election Day: 95 votes for Breen, 65 votes for Manchester and 11 blanks.”
It’s ironic that the problem occurred in Long Island of all places. As we noted in our initial report on this mystery, Long Island is the only one of the 7 comprising Senate District 25 which hand-counts its ballots on Election Night. All of the others use oft-failed, sometimes wildly inaccurate and easily-manipulated, optical-scan computer tabulators to tally hand-marked paper ballots. While the computer scanners may tally accurately, they usually are off by at least a few ballots and sometimes by a great deal and, in any event, its impossible to know one way or another unless the paper ballots are actually counted by human beings, as Long Island’s were in the first place.
As The BRAD BLOG’s review of the November 18 recount documentation [PDF] discovered, all of those other towns (save for tiny Chebeague Island) reported inaccuracies in the initial computer-tallied results once the paper ballots were subjected to a hand “recount” on November 18.
Unlike the computer-tallied towns in the District, other than those 21 “phantom ballots”, Long Island’s public Election Night hand-count had been perfect. The new public hand-count on Tuesday in the state Senate confirms that fact, and has served to vindicate the town, its Town Clerk, the 238 registered voters of Long Island, and the process of publicly hand-counting hand-marked paper ballots.
Republican resigns, Democrat to be sworn in
After the mystery was dramatically and publicly resolved, according to the Press Herald, Manchester, who was “seated in the front row for most of the morning, quickly departed.” She had been provisionally seated by Republicans on December 3rd, when the new session of the legislator first convened.
She then returned a bit later to the room to announce her resignation.
“I have full confidence that no one did anything wrong, that we have human error at the recount,” she said. “I believe the people of District 25 have spoken, and they have spoken to vote Catherine Breen as their state senator.”
For her part, the Democrat Breen was justifiably jubilant. “I want to thank the committee for their dogged pursuit of the facts that helped us get to the bottom of the mystery on Long Island. I am grateful and humbled by the outpouring of support from the voters in my district and for Democratic leadership who stood up for the integrity of the electoral process,” Breen said. “Today’s answers will allow us to move forward and get to work on the issues that are important to Mainers.”
BDN’s Amy Fried pointed out on Tuesday that all of this could have been easily avoided. “There wouldn’t have been any of this drama if the GOP had agreed to check the ballots again, as requested during the recount.”
“No matter how understandable the double count is in retrospect, when the numbers didn’t match the initial count nor the number on the voter roster, the simplest thing would have to been to do the count again,” Fried wrote. “After all, we are not talking about thousands of ballots. By all counts, there were fewer than 200. If that had happened, everything would have been done right there and then. This wouldn’t have been a news story or a mystery.”
She went on to ding the new Senate President, Republican Sen. Mike Thibodeau, who, over the objections of Democrats, provisionally seated Manchester last week. “It’s unfortunate that folks were disappointed with the outcome of the recount and are unwilling to accept the result,” Thibodeau said at the time, dismissing critics who pointed out the lack of provenance for those “new” ballots tallied in Long Island during the recount.
On Tuesday, after the new recount, Thibodeau was a bit more contrite when asked for comment: “You can’t read my word balloon, man.”
Fried offered one more piece of advice which should be well-taken by all partisans: “Republicans and Democrats should both take this to heart and not try to resolve contested elections before all the facts are in.”
We might add: “…and until all of the votes are publicly hand-counted and reconciled with the poll books.”
About that Town Clerk…
When the story of Maine’s “phantom ballots” first broke, we attempted to contact Long Island Town Clerk Brenda Singo to ask about the specific processes used for her town’s hand-counting on Election Night and for the chain of custody of ballots thereafter.
Our emailed questions had been pretty straightforward, since criticism had flared up in the media and on the Internet against her, despite the fact that it appeared she was likely innocent in the matter. After all, while some had claimed she was the one with access to the ballots, so the first “suspect” in the matter, she had also been the one to sign off on not only the 171 ballots counted on Election Night, but also on the 171 voter names present in the Voter Manifest. If she was going to help steal the election for Republicans, waiting until after the public hand-count on Election Night to add 21 ballots to the box would be an ill-advised way to do so, particularly when the initial public hand-count also perfectly matched the voter registry.
The BRAD BLOG was the only outlet, to our knowledge, to note that the town’s Election Night hand-count — the only town to hold such a count — was perfect. We had hoped this “mystery” would not, therefore, be used to try and discredit public, precinct-based hand-counting on Election Night — what we describe around here as Democracy’s Gold Standard.
Nonetheless, Singo refused to answer our simple questions about the town’s procedures, telling us that she would answer any and all questions, but only after her testimony to the state Senate. That response was puzzling and became more frustrating still, once the Special Committee decided to postpone its initial meeting by a week.
“I will be available to answer questions, and provide information regarding the procedure of the election following the hearing next Tuesday,” she wrote to us. “I will keep you updated should there be any further changes.”
When we questioned why she couldn’t respond to the simple procedural questions, as pretty much every election official we’ve ever queried on such mundane issues has in the past, she responded: “Once I have had my opportunity to speak with the Senate panel, I will be more than accommodating to address any inquiries. I’m asking that you respect my position in this matter.”
It was as if she was facing a criminal investigation. At the time, she was not and — with the ballots in custody of the state by that time — surely she must have known she was not guilty of any wrong-doing at all. Refusing to respond was an odd position for her to take, particularly with a media outlet which was actually somewhat sympathetic to her (if always skeptical of everybody) in this matter. Her response resulted in more suspicion, rather than less, and seems, ultimately, to have been ill-advised.
Nonetheless, we waited for the hearing, and today, it seems, Singo, who has been the Town Clerk since 1999, is clearly vindicated. A less thoughtful media outlet might have gone after her for her bizarre refusal to answer questions, however.
“It’s been a very difficult two weeks,” she told local media at the State House after the dramatic conclusion of the mystery. Singo said she’s “a very by-the-books person”, explaining to local reporters: “I have the checklist provided by the Secretary of State’s office. When the polls close, we go step by step, dot our i’s and cross our t’s to the best of our ability.”
As of publication, we have yet to receive the answers she previously promised. But, given that the mystery is now “solved” — and public hand-counting of paper ballots has been vindicated once again — most of those questions no longer matter quite as much.
It’s nice to see, in any event, that we finally have an “election fraud” mystery with a conclusive conclusion. It’s nicer still to see that it was publicly hand-counted, hand-marked paper ballots that made all the difference by settling this mystery for all voters, including supporters of both the winner and the loser alike in Maine’s Senate District 25 election.
(Snail mail support to “Brad Friedman, 7095 Hollywood Blvd., #594 Los Angeles, CA 90028” always welcome too!)
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This story should be considered a significant positive for election integrity. The availability of a publicly observed hand count and poll book count on election night provided the baseline. The ability to conduct the “open” recount in the presence of a detective from the AG’s office permitted a verifiable determination as to whether the error was to be found in the original count or the Nov. 18 recount.
Of course, if there is an adequate chain of custody, the same verification can be made by public counting of paper ballots initially counted by op scan systems, that raises the question as to why one bothers with the expense of an initial op scan tabulation.
And, of course, as DREs are 100% unverifiable, there can be nothing resembling election integrity in their “reported” results.
Not buying it.
The news accounts I read indicated that the 21 ballots in question were all marked for Manchester, and had no votes cast for any other race.
What are the odds that this many people would vote in the State Senate race, and in no other?
1st Republican said @ 2:
What “news accounts”? Got links? I’ve seen no such accounts, but I’d be happy to give your source(s) a look.
My understanding is that all of those ballots did have votes for Manchester, but not that they were undervotes in all other cases. Since the recount process likely separated the ballots into two stacks (votes for Manchester and votes for Breen), it would make perfect sense that the stack that got counted twice was left over from the first batch, already separated by District 25 votes, and included all Manchester votes.
But, I’d be more than happy to see your source claiming the 21 “mystery” ballots were all votes for Manchester and only for Manchester.
Applause both for Brad’s coverage of this story – and the vindication of the “democracy’s gold medal standard” for election transparency.
1st Republican@2: What’s not to buy? The 2nd recount perfectly matched the original election night vote count totals. Except, the one box was missing 21 votes for the Republican, and the other had 21 extra. Quite clear that in the original recount, the stack of votes from the one box was mistakenly grouped with the ballots from the other box after counting, and so counted twice, then placed back in that other ballot box.
Brad, you did a great service to the Election Integrity movement by doggedly staying on this story. It really was a mystery how all of a sudden 21 ballots are “discovered”, especially all being marked for the Republican candidate. It just didn’t pass the “smell” test and you knew it. Your reporting of the chain of events (and the lack of chain of custody reporting when the 21 Manchester ballots got “slipped in” to Lot A2) has done wonders to show the absolute importance of hand-counting paper ballots at the precinct before the ballots ever leave the precinct.
This story should stand as a classic example to be used by thousands of EI folks across the nation to show why HCPB is so incredibly important to the integrity of the vote counting process. We must always remember, “it’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes!” In this case, the vote counters were the … [Deputy Secretary of State, Julie] Flynn and a detective from the state Attorney General’s office [who] publicly hand counted all of Long Island’s ballots again.” And yet the Republicans blocked the effort to conduct a recount – something that would typically take maybe three or four hours. I base that having personally observed a recount along with Professor Judy Alter in a very small county in California consisting of about 850 or so ballots. It’s such a shame that the party that has the most to loose would block something as basic as a simple publically observed hand-recount. Shame on the Republicans and I would say exactly the same if it had been the Democrats blocking the hand-count, and I know you would too. Again, thanks for bringing this story to light and following it to the end.
Excellent story.
Singo’s response sounds to me like she was following advice from her lawyer. Given the world as it is, unfortunately, it was probably good advice. Even though it cast suspicion on her to be silent, people who were not her friends could have found something, anything she said, to twist or take out of context to cast even more suspicion on her.
http://www.pressherald.com/2014/11/25/maine-democratic-party-claims-phantom-ballots-in-state-senate-race/
“Rachel Irwin, a spokeswoman for the Maine Democratic Party, told the Press Herald that the 21 ballots for Manchester were discovered at the top of the original pile of ballots in the locked box from Long Island and appeared to be folded differently than the others.”
—–
http://www.centralmaine.com/2014/11/28/our-opinion-senate-should-probe-ballots/
However, during a recount, 21 uncounted ballots, all cast for Manchester, were discovered in the ballot box from the small town of Long Island.
—–
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/10/1350704/-Ballotgate-II-Maine-Becomes-Nation-s-Electoral-Laughingstock
“Also, there’s Breen’s statement, also included in the Advance Journal, that made the clear allegation that the 21 ballots were marked only for Manchester, not for anyone else.”
1st Republic @ 7:
You originally alleged @ 2…
In response, I asked for the links to the “news accounts” you say you had read. You didn’t supply any in response to support that contention, but offered a few other things @ 7. So, lemme respond to each of them…
That comes from a news account (the Portland Press Herald), but doesn’t speak to the notion that the ballots in question were only marked for Manchester and had no other votes on them. You would think if they had no other votes on them, that point would have been at the top of her complaint.
Given the existing explanation for what ultimately happened, it makes sense that the 21 ballots in question would be on top. At least, it’s not particularly unusual. The explanation is that 21 votes from one pile (already sorted for Manchester) ended up being added to another pile when they were put away. There were 4 “piles” over all, apparently, with 50 in each and then 21 in the last pile after the initial hand-count, for a total of 171. One of the “50” piles included 21 votes for Manchester that reportedly got added to the small “21” stack. If that stack was the last one added to the box when the ballots were put away, it makes sense that they’d be the first ones pulled out.
Can’t speak to the “folded differently than the others” contention, as its the first I recall seeing it. Haven’t seen any other reference to the folding of the ballots.
In any event, no reference to those 21 “phantom ballots” containing votes ONLY for Manchester in that piece, or in any other one I’d seen since the story emerged (and I’ve been trying to follow it closely). If it happened, it makes little sense that the spokesperson for the Maine Democratic Party (which was challenging the inclusion of the “phantom ballots”) wouldn’t make that point front and center.
Next quote:
That’s also a news account, and its akin to the many other reports I’d seen (and, indeed, to the one I filed originally). It refers to the fact that all of the ballots had votes on them for Manchester, but doesn’t suggest those were the ONLY votes on those ballots.
Finally…
That’s not a “news account”, but a blogger at Daily Kos. (Note: Nothing wrong with a blog report, but, in this case, the quote you cite is the blogger opining in a piece following the new count that took place in the Maine Senate, after the blogger had previously and strongly asserted that he believed the initial mystery represented a case of “fraud” by Republicans. As the blogger notes in the very same piece: “Of course, I’ve got a dog in this hunt myself in the fact that I’ve blogged this story with the assumption that fraud has occurred, so take this all with that particular grain of salt included.”)
That said, I hadn’t seen “Breen’s statement” that the blogger refers to, so I looked it up, and it appears to be from this 12/2/14 letter from Breen to the state Senate he is talking about.
Indeed, in that letter from Breen, in the section about her concerns about the Long Island votes, she writes [emphasis mine]:
Breen offers quite a bit more detail about those ballots (as well as concerns discovered during the initial “recount” in the other, machine-tallied towns), but doesn’t offer any other detail or underscored concerns that one would assume would be brought to the forefront if those ballots “had no votes cast for any other race,” as you asserted.
It seems that would have been a HUGE issue, not only for Breen, but in all the other news accounts, as well as in the 5-hour Senate hearing. Yet, this is the first I’ve heard of it and Breen offers no other reference to it herself in her Dec. 2nd letter to the state Senate asking for an official investigation.
It’s certainly possible the ballots then in question had no other votes on them, but as no news accounts or any other statements from either election officials or elected officials or candidates or the parties speak to that point, it seems far more likely that Breen was trying to say in her letter that ‘an additional 21 ballots were found and all were marked for Manchester’, rather than “only marked for”.
Given the dearth of reference to the issue elsewhere (at least as far as what I’ve seen, and what you’ve been able to find), it makes much more sense to interpret that as her description of ‘ballots marked only for her opponent’, rather than ballots that contained no other votes in any other race.
I am certainly open to any other evidence to support your initial contention, or any other to suggest fraud at work here, but I’ve yet to see any to date, above and beyond that Daily Kos blogger’s belief that “something smells fishy here”.
Keep in mind that to pull off the scheme you seem to be suggesting, not only would someone have to be clever enough to get those 21 phantom ballots into a locked box after Election Night, but they’d also have to be clever enough to get them removed from the same locked box, this time in the custody of state law enforcement. It could be done, obviously, if you had enough insiders in on the scheme, but they’d have to be pretty smart to do it. And if they were that smart, it sure seems like they wouldn’t have been dumb enough to add them after the initial Election Night count, and then add votes ONLY for Manchester, and for no other candidate in the SD25 race or any other race, AND make no adjustment to the voting manifests to justify the newly added ballots.
It’d be both an incredibly smart and incredibly dumb scheme at the very same time, with little or no credible evidence to support the fact that it happened at all, frankly.
So, until such evidence is offered, this case remains pretty closed-looking to me still.
Lora said @ 6:
That’s all well and good. And, it’d be good advice from a lawyer, except for the fact that she’s still a public official and not under criminal investigation (to my knowledge). Moreover, the questions I’d asked were almost entirely procedural (what’s the procedure for hand-counting in the town? How many people witnessed the hand-counting? Where were ballots stored after the hand-count? Are you a Republican or Democrat?, etc.) All questions that could have been/should have been answered in a straight-forward manner, as any other public official would — and certainly any other election official after an election about which there were questions…particularly if they knew they had done nothing wrong or out of the ordinary.
So, it still strikes me as odd that she didn’t respond. For the record, she has yet to respond, despite her repeated promise before the Senate hearing to do so after she had completed her testimony there.
Well shut my mouth – I am amazed that the State Senate Panel, with a 5-4 Republican majority, took the common sense action of re-recounting the ballots rather than just rubber-stamping their candidate’s “victory” and ordering the ballots burned. Huh.
In defense of “1st Republic”, while he overstated the case, that truth is that we don’t know — and will never know — whether the double-counting that happened during the initial recount was the result of human error or deliberate manipulation.
It might seem unlikely that someone deliberately moved that stack in such a way that it would be counted twice. But is it any more unlikely than the explanation that a stack of 21 ballots from one batch was left out on the table when the next batch was brought out — and no one noticed? That also seems unlikely.
WHAT happened is now clear. WHY, less so.
My basic impression is that the local GOPers had a plan, TRIED to slip one by, but suddenly felt they were going to get caught, and pulled back from their dirty trick to let the REAL results come thru.
Am I being unfair or slanted, in feeling this?
#11 Nikto..I think you are right. I live in ME and know of two instances of voter recounts that were odd, close to where I live. They will steal if they can get by with it. The further north you go in this state , the more conservative it gets. The republican party chair lost his job after the 2012 primaries were called off for Arroostook County for snow. (laughable) Good chance Mitt Romney would have lost to Ron Paul…I’ll bet there were a lot of odd things in that particular republican primary as Mitt Romney was not popular. Now, I have read in one place that the democrats may not have a primary in 2016…which is the only way hillary clinton could win.