After a very close race for the two 3-year Brattleboro School Director seats, a re-count will likely be initiated for votes cast in Brattleboro, Dummerston, Putney and Guilford for those two seats.
The three candidates, and the number of votes each candidate received from the four member towns of the Windham Southeast School District are as follows: Timothy “Tim” Maciel – 1,677 votes; Colleen Savage – 1661 votes; Rich Leavy – 1659 votes.
(Note: “Official” election counts are in from Brattleboro and Dummerston, which is why the vote numbers reflected are slightly adjusted from those reported late Tuesday evening.)
In addition to a re-count, a candidate may petition the courts for a re-vote.
– Mo Hart, WSESD
Will this resolve the Dummerston Issue?
A re-count when a winning candidate polls just 2 votes ahead of the candidate who thus loses makes sense, but, as reported in the media, there was an error on the Dummerston ballot in this election: As officially printed, the ballot instructed the voter to “vote for one” of the 3 candidates for the 2 Brattleboro seats being elected, when it should have read “vote for not more than TWO.” A simple recount of all four towns’ ballots is useful, but it won’t catch those Dummerston ballots where the faulty instructions may have lead to voter confusion. I would think those doing the Dummerston recount would look for ballots where there is only one candidate selected for the Brattleboro seats. Of course some voters, even if they had had accurate instructions, might intentionally have voted for only one. But it’s more than likely that any such ballots were so marked as the result of the error. (I understand corrective measures were taken early on — signs posted in the voting booths, etc. But it seems nonetheless too risky, given the current 2-vote margin, to assume that the error did not influence at least two votes. )