Six losing candidates in this year’s general elections have sent letters, emails or filed formal complaints with the St. Thomas Board of Elections and the V.I. Office of Elections demanding a new election and an investigation into purported discrepancies and legal violations. While the process was not perfect, the complaints lack merit and do not come close to justifying a recount, an investigation or a new election, as these sore losers demand. The St. Croix board voted to reject those petitions before it on Wednesday and the St. Thomas board should follow suit when it meets Thursday afternoon.
All the complaints make long lists of grievances about the way the election was held, how much education about paper ballots was done, how open the tallying process was, the color of the paper ballots, and the precise timing of board of election meetings and notices. Several insinuate conspiracies to manipulate the vote outcomes. None provide any evidence of any actual vote manipulation or any evidence that any particular race’s outcome is incorrect.
While an exhaustive analysis of each claim by each loser would take hundreds of pages, a cursory look finds numerous factual inaccuracies alongside a mishmash of vague accusations that bear little relation to the legal requirements for a recount or a new election. V.I. law (Title 18, section 629) says before the boards of elections may approve a petition for a recount, the petitioner must swear he or she has "reason to believe and does believe that the records or copies of records made by the election officers at one or more polling places in such district are erroneous, specifying wherein he deems such records or copies thereof to be in error or that votes were cast by persons not entitled to vote therein, and that he believes that a recount of the ballots cast in the district will affect the nomination or election of one or more candidates voted for at such primary or election." (Italics added)
The most thorough and coherent complaint comes from Norma Pickard Samuel, who ran for delegate to Congress.
Samuel says the voting machines we use may be easily tampered with, and as evidence she cites the "May 2008, Lehigh University study, overseen by Dr. Daniel Lopresti, titled “Analysis of a Danaher / Shouptronic 1242 Electronic Voting Machine,” which she says not only “revealed voting machines such as those used in our elections can be purchased from government surplus for as little as $25, but also that, left unguarded, the machine can be accessed in as little as 15 minutes and the microchip responsible for vote tallies can be surreptitiously removed from the motherboard with a pair of pliers and replaced."
But in reality, the document she is citing is not a "Lehigh University Study" or a "study" at all. It is a rough draft of an undergraduate paper by a student who was taking an "independent study" as part of his course load [See Student Paper]. And that undergraduate’s rough draft of a class paper did not show that the chip could be easily replaced. Rather the student speculated that it might "theoretically" be possible to replace a single machine’s chip if there were no seals and no security measures.
The machines used in the territory do have such seals. Inspecting those seals is a major component of the machine certification process. And Samuel gives no evidence that any tampering actually took place.
Samuel also cites scholars who have found the voting machines used currently can, in fact, fail and lose all their votes. Those scholars present anecdotal evidence that a vote may be recorded inaccurately, but not that this has happened or affected any actual election. And Samuel offers no evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, of any vote tampering in the territory.
Samuel also says: "There is no evidence of posting of notices at least three weeks before the primary election, in public places, specifying the time of the election, location of polling places, hours the polling places will be open, and the names of candidates to be voted on in that district."
But in fact, all that information was printed in the Virgin Islands Daily News by Aug. 15, and the information was posted in the elections offices in both districts. The Source printed the candidates’ names a few days later, when lots were cast for ballot position. The information was widely disseminated more than three weeks before the election.
Whether it was posted in additional places is at most a technical issue that does not affect public awareness and hardly merits a new election. And just because Samuel is unaware of "evidence," does not mean it does not exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
And even if she is correct, it may be cause for criticism of the board’s adherence to posting requirements, but bears no relation to the legal requirements for a recount, has no mention of any specific incorrect vote, nor gives any reason to believe Samuel would have increased her tally from 10 percent of the vote to victory.
Samuel argues the election should be nullified because there was "no meaningful, advance public outreach nor voter education by the Boards of Elections or its supervisor to aide voters in transition from electronic voting machine to paper ballot use, thus diminishing individual’s voter’s rights," which she says violates V.I. Code, Title 18, Chap. 3, subchapter III, section 47, as well as a section of the federal Help America Vote Act.
But the territory did not "transition from electronic voting machine to paper ballot," and all voters were able to use the electronic machines. And the local law she cites does not even mention such "voter education."
The HAVA act, which applies to elections to federal office, does call for a voter education effort for each ballot type. However, the penalty for noncompliance, if there was such, is the threat of withholding of federal funds – not the nullification of an election to benefit a candidate who lost by an overwhelming margin. And in reality, Elections Board members actually spent weeks on outreach, appearing on radio shows and giving interviews about the elections process in the lead-up to the election.
Finally, St. Croix had a total of 20 spoiled ballots in the congressional race. St. Thomas has not released that level of detail yet for its spoiled ballots, but if there were 10 times as many spoiled congressional ballots there – or even 100 times as many – and every single one was actually a vote for Samuel, it would not swing the election in her favor.
Samuel correctly points out that V.I. law requires all paper ballots be printed on colored paper and that they are required to include a photograph of each candidate. But she offers no explanation of why this calls the election results into question or should result in the extreme measure of nullification of the election. Asked about the colored ballots Wednesday, Joint Boards of Elections Chairman Rupert Ross said there was a problem with the printing company at the last minute, so the board tried to comply with the intent of the law by having the ballots color coded with different colored ink.
That is a glitch and did not meet the strict letter of the law, Ross conceded Wednesday, saying it was beyond the board’s control. But again, it bears no relation to the requirements for holding recounts and new elections, as it has no bearing on whether any candidate’s vote tally is not accurate and provides no reason to think a recount would result in Samuel increasing her showing from 10 percent to victory.
She goes on to make a wide array of complaints that have no bearing on whether or not to nullify the election, ranging from problems with the elections website to the status of HAVA funds withheld because the St. Thomas/St. John election headquarters was not sufficiently accessible to the handicapped.
Senate candidates Lawrence Olive and Naomi Sandra Joseph raise nearly identical concerns as those outlined above. Olive came in eighth place and is only 65 votes short of winning a seat, while Joseph came in 11th place with 2,500 votes and three losing candidates ahead of her. Neither make any claim or present any evidence of any actual, specific error in the vote tally, much less one that would likely change the result, as required by law before a recount can be approved.
Another losing candidate for delegate; Warren Mosler, sent a letter asking for an investigation into the election, because he claims, without evidence, that there was more support for himself than the vote tally indicated. He claims vaguely that two polls by someone unnamed showed him losing by wide margins help justify a recount: "Two external surveys reported Donna Christensen receiving well under 50 percent of the vote and also reported I was receiving over 40 percent of the vote," Mosler wrote in his petition for an "investigation." Bolstering the anonymous polls showing him losing badly, Mosler refers to "anecdotal evidence from employers speaking to employees" and "informal exit polling at all of the St. Croix polls" among other unsubstantiated non-evidence.
Mosler also says he had "reports from insiders at the machine vote counting indicated they were reading 43 percent for Donna and 37 percent for me shortly before the official results were reported."
But the tally was updated repeatedly on election night and distributed to media and others outside elections offices at multiple times, and the late night tally updates did not show Mosler that close behind Christensen.
Mosler gives no evidence that the vote count is inaccurate or that a recount would bring him from the 17 percent of the vote he received all the way to victory.
Harriet Mercer and Diane Magras, two losing candidates for the St. Thomas-St. John Board of Elections, have been raising numerous objections throughout the election process. In their petition for a recount, the pair say they want a new election, not because the outcome is incorrect, but because of "discrepancies" and "bad attitudes."
The two both lost by convincing margins. Mercer received 1,276 votes: almost 1,000 votes short of what she would need to overtake Lawrence Boschulte’s 2,273 votes and win a seat on the board. Magras did worse. But the two do not even argue that they have any chance of winning:
"This is not necessarily about changing the outcome of the election, but it is to ensure the results are indeed the truest reflection of the votes as cast and intended. Right now, we have no cumulative evidence to suggest any of that. We just could not buy into the idea of not challenging a process that we observed and know is flawed; even right down to unjustified bad attitudes," the pair wrote.
"The process was started wrong, so it ended likewise, right down to the Board’s fabricated certification report,” the pair concluded, echoing a breathless email they sent to media after the St. Thomas/St. John certification where they argue the certification does not count because it "was NOT signed in our presence; and the one which Board Member Boschulte did sign was some other paper. We have a picture of that. We know because Board Chairwoman Wells told us the original cert. doc. already went downstairs when we asked to see the signed version. We saw none of the 5 Board Members present sign it in public, nor take it downstairs."
But the Source received a photocopy of the certification document within an hour of its signing, and it is plainly signed by five members of the board, including Boschulte, none of whom are claiming their signatures were forged. The document image is viewable here: [STT/STJ General Election Certification] and anyone can view the metadata saying when it was scanned and what sort of machine it was produced upon.
To claim that somehow those five members did not sign the document, but instead arranged to have their own signatures forged on a fabricated document and pretend to sign it is silly. To what end?
Magras and Mercer also claim that they have different, more reliable vote tallies that they compiled independently. But given that they assert that Boschulte did not sign a document that he plainly signed, and thus get one of five names on a piece of paper wrong, their assertions about vote totals cannot be considered credible.
It may be that the paper ballots should have been on colored paper and there may be other flaws in how the 2012 election was carried out. But none of the factually accurate claims about the election come anywhere close to evidence that any contest would have had a different outcome. And all the complainants make numerous demonstrably false claims, intermingled with complaints that have nothing to do with whether a new election is called for.
The St. Croix board voted Wednesday to reject Mosler’s and Joseph’s petitions, and disregarded Samuels’ petition because it was not notarized then delivered as required by the law. The St. Thomas/St. John board will be addressing the petitions Thursday. It should follow the St. Croix board and reject these time and money-wasting requests.
The territory has too many actual, non-imaginary problems to waste time and money soothing the egos of sore losers and tinfoil hat conspiracy theory junkies. Move on already.
