Fire Up The Coffee Pot–With Hennessy-Brown Separated By One Vote, Judge Approves A Manual Hand Count Of All Ballots Cast

Superior Court Judge Barry Stevens on Friday approved a manual hand count of all the ballots cast in the August 9 Democratic primary that showed State Rep. Jack Hennessy with a one-vote lead over City Councilman Marcus Brown following a machine tabulation recanvassing. Hennessy picked up six votes in the recount.

The Brown campaign filed a lawsuit Monday alleging a number of irregularities in the handling of the ballots. The hand count of more than 1,100 ballots is scheduled to start Monday morning and will likely take the full day or more to complete.

Observers will be designated by the respective campaign camps to follow the process and highlight any perceived irregularities. In a hand recount, ballots are eyeballed rather than fed through an optical scanner. In a process like this a number of challenges could be raised by both sides which could become issues for the court to decide.

Based on a statement issued by the Brown campaign this step is likely just the first in a process. Another step could be asking the court for a new primary vote depending on the orderliness of the hand count that now is subject to interpretation by the human element.

Stevens signed off on a hand count agreement after approval by both campaigns. Read the decision here.

Statement from the Brown camp.

We are very pleased that Judge Stevens has ordered a manual hand recount of all of the ballots cast in the primary for State Representative for the 127th District due to the high number of irregularities that occurred at the recanvass on August 16th. However, this is just the beginning.

This recount will likely only resolve issues related to the discrepancies in machine counts of in-person and absentee ballots. It may not resolve the issue of the many missing absentee ballots, a fact which has been publicly acknowledged by city election officials and also by members of the Hennessy campaign.

If ballots continue to be missing, we will petition the Court to search all of the ballots citywide for those that are missing. If that is not possible, a special primary election will need to be ordered.

In order for our democracy to be meaningful, every vote must be counted. The will of the people of the 127th District must be honored, whatever the outcome. We are confident that Judge Stevens has started us on the path to ensure that this happens.