Monday, June 05, 2006

Irregular Vote Totals For LG and SoS Races

A reader sent me a spreadsheet with this tally of the convention votes provided by the party today and pointed to some mystery with the vote totals. While the final percentages equal what the party reported, some of the results on the chart are a little strange and two in particular stand out. The first, and biggest discrepancy is that there are 100 extra votes for Lieutenant Governor in the Second Suffolk district. There were 184 votes cast in that district for Secretary of State (115 for Bonifaz, 66 for Galvin, 3 no votes) and 186 votes cast for Governor (15 for Gabrieli, 143 for Patrick, 24 for Reilly and 4 no votes). At the same time, the party reports 284 votes for Lieutenant Governor -- with Deb Goldberg getting 50, Tim Murray getting 137 and Andrea Silbert getting 91. At first I thought it might be a mistake in transcribing the results to the party's web page, but the sums and percentages check out with the extra hundred votes. It's hard to imagine that they would have missed something this large.

At the same time, the Plymouth & Barnstable District Secretary of State race is missing 50 votes. According to the party's web page, Galvin got 25 votes there while Bonifaz got 18, for a total of 43 votes. In the Governor and Lieutenant Governor races in that district, there were a total of 93 votes. Here are those vote totals in table format:

DistrictTotal Votes SecStateTotal Votes LGTotal Votes Gov
Second Suffolk184284186
Plymouth & Barnstable439393

Now, I'm sure there's an explanation for these discrepancies, and they don't change who won the endorsement or who got on the ballot. It may just be that the campaigns didn't care to challenge the results for those offices. Still, I find it disturbing that there are these large anomalies in the vote totals, particularly after the party spent so many hours counting them on Saturday.