By Guy Page
Last Tuesday night I discovered that in my town of Berlin, anyway, the new Dominion voting tabulator counted votes just fine. I know because I and a handful of other Justices of the Peace counted the results ourselves.
When the polls close after every Town Meeting, Primary and General Election, the Town of Berlin Justices of the Peace go to work. We count the number of ballots to ensure the tabulator counted accurately. We record the write-in candidates – something no scanner can yet do reliably. (Santa and Mickey Mouse usually fare well.) When the tabulator spits out a tape of election results, we read and sign it.
The work takes just an hour or two. The even split of Republicans and Democrats work collegially. If there’s a spat it’s usually because one Type A personality is telling another Type A how to improve their performance, with predictable results. It’s never about politics.
Some JP’s are politically active. Some aren’t. It doesn’t matter. And although we trust each other, a Republican will always verify a Democrat’s count, and vice-versa. Trust but verify – that’s how the system works and in both towns in which I’ve been a JP (Cambridge is the other), it works happily and well.
Justices of the Peace are among the few remaining elected offices in Vermont where the titles Democrat and Republican matter, yet all truly work together in the common interest.
What we don’t do – normally – is count the actual voting results. Handcounting is no longer the law of the state. Machines scan hand-marked ballots and tabulate the results.
This year, we finished all of our ‘official’ work and decided, at the request of JP Carl Parton, to audit one statewide race. We decided we would examine all 1254 ballots cast (mailed in, same-day voted, the works) and count by hand the results of the lieutenant governor race between Republican Joe Benning and Democrat David Zuckerman. That race was chosen long after the polls closed and the final tape was printed out.
Parton and I and others knew that many voters were questioning the accuracy and even the integrity of the Dominion voting machines. One JP said she heard people feed their ballots into the machine saying, ‘Dominion, huh? Into the shredder it goes.’
Speaking personally, my mind was open. The handcount would either match the machine totals, or it wouldn’t. And if it didn’t, someone would have some ‘splainin’ to do.
We paired off into several teams of two JPs each – one Dem, one GOP. While one counted, the other verified. In my case I counted about 250 ballots, while a Democrat watched and verified.
And in fact the final totals were off – but only by one vote. The machine counted 596 for Benning, 557 for Zuckerman. We counted 595 for Benning, 558 for Zuckerman. The consensus was that we probably B a Z by mistake.
“It shows that we went the extra mile,” Parton said. “We were doing something that people have done for 200 years. It was fun.”
I left the Berlin Town Office glad we’d engaged in the informal, unofficial audit. For me, anyway, it set to rest any concerns about a miscount, at least in our Town and in that race.