AMHERST — Ballot counting for Amherst’s biennial election continued Monday morning, nearly a week after polls closed, following the discovery of 17 ballots that had been placed in the town clerk’s vault without being tallied on election night.
The continued process of counting ballots has not yet resolved the outcome of the tightest race, where District 4 Councilor Evan Ross lost his reelection bid to the Town Council to challenger Pamela Rooney by four votes. Anika Lopes already decisively won one of the two District 4 seats on the 13-member council.
Meantime, Ross has taken out the forms necessary to seek a recount in his race. Town Clerk Susan Audette said Ross will need to file those forms, with the signatures of 10 residents from his district, by 5 p.m. Friday.
In the Town Room at Town Hall in front of about 20 observers, including both Rooney and Ross, the latest batch of uncounted ballots were recorded.
KP Law attorney Gregg Corbo said the public event at Town Hall was needed due to an administrative oversight on election night. According to Corbo, the town clerk determined there was not enough time to deliver those ballots to their precincts so they could be run through machines. They were never hand-counted on election night.
“We had an incident during Election Day in which 17 voters voted prior to close by leaving (ballots) at the ballot box at Town Hall,” Corbo said.
But the ballots also were not counted by hand in the clerk’s office that evening.
“They should have been counted by the town clerk’s office on election night,” Audette said.
She explained that a log book details the times the ballots were removed from the box outside Town Hall. The log book also shows that the ballots got put into the vault before being tabulated.
Sitting in the middle of the Town Room, warden Gale Longto read the votes from each of the 17 ballots while election clerk Fran Goodwin transcribed those votes onto tally sheets that included the positions being elected, including Town Council, School Committee, Jones Library Trustees, Amherst Housing Authority and Elector under the Oliver Smith Will. Also on the ballot was the referendum on the $36.3 million Jones Library project.
None of the newly discovered votes changed the outcome of any election.
The unofficial results of the voting in District 4 on election night showed Lopes winning with 568 votes, followed by Rooney with 454 votes and Ross with 451 votes. Since that night, Audette said an auxiliary ballot, which is a ballot that the machines were not able to process on election night, has added one vote to Rooney’s possible winning margin.
Ross, Rooney and Lopes all got one additional vote Monday, along with one more vote for both District 3 incumbent Dorothy Pam and District 3 challenger Jennifer Taub. Pam and Taub won seats in a contested election over incumbent George Ryan.
In other contested elections, reelected incumbents Mandi Jo Hanneke got another 12 votes and Andy Steinberg got another nine votes, while newcomer Ellisha Walker, who also won an at-large seat, got an additional 13 votes. Those who trailed also earned more votes, with Vira Douangmany-Cage picking up another five and Vincent O’Connor getting three more votes.
For School Committee, incumbents Peter Demling and Ben Herrington both got 10 more votes added to their totals, and incumbent Allison McDonald received seven more votes. They all won reelection, alongside Jennifer Page, who got six more votes, and Irv Rhodes, who picked up another eight. While not reelected, incumbent Heather Lord got nine more votes and challenger Phoebe Merriam got another five.
Of the 17 ballots, 14 were “yes” on the library referendum, two were “no” and one voter left the question blank.
During the Monday session, Audette also retrieved envelopes, including ones for provisional and spoiled ballots, inadvertently locked in ballot transfer boxes from three voting precincts.
Audette said these boxes had to be opened to get materials out, including at least one tally sheet and voter lists. “This is post-election cleanup,” Audette said.
No additional provisional ballots were found inside these boxes, though.
Before the tallying began, Audette explained that if any of the 17 ballots were cast by voters who already had voted, these ballots would be thrown out.
As for the possible recount, Audette said she was awaiting a determination on the legitimacy of a provisional ballot and the eligibility of the voter by having that person’s voter registration inspected by officials with the Registry of Motor Vehicles. Late on Monday, Audette said she had received word that the voter was properly registered at the Greenfield registry, and that person’s ballot would count.
There are also a handful of overseas ballots that, so long as they’re postmarked on or before Election Day, will also count in the election vote if received within 10 days of the election.
Audette said she will not be updating the preliminary election results until she has official, certified results in hand.
