Q&A: Deborah Markowitz, Secretary of State

Vermont Business Magazine, Feb 01, 2007

The other 74 use optical scan machines. Now these are our biggest communities, so most voters in Vermont are voting on ballots that win be read and counted by an optical scan machine.

VBM: Percentage-wise, how does that breakdown?

Markowitz: A little bit over half are voting on ballots that are optically scanned, What happens is that when you get to be, oh, 800 or 1,000 voters, we start recommending that the town consider moving to an optical scan machine. What we discovered in this recount is that those machines are very accurate. There are only minor changes, like the machine might not recognize a vote where there was an erasure, or somebody didn't mark darkly enough and a human being taking a look at that ballot in a recount would say, "Oh yes, they really intended to vote." So, with the excep tion of those kinds of minor changes, we found that they are really highly accurate. And we found that the hand counting itself was highly accurate.

What wasn't accurate, and what resulted in the tainted outcome, was that as numbers were transferred from form to form, when two people, a Republican and a Democrat are sitting down counting ballots, they count them on a piece of paper. That tally sheet is then added to a central tally sheet. What happened in the Brock/Salmon race is, as these were transferred to the central taffy sheet, the votes for Salmon were inadvertently, on just a few of those tally sheets, placed in the columns for (Liberty Union candidate) Jerry Levy, which was right above Salmon, because they'd failed to put a zero as a place holder for Levy.

It told us that perhaps if we changed the instructions on the form, changed our training to make sure that all the folks who are tallying votes are putting a place holder number, a zero if somebody doesn't get any votes, so that as the votes are transferred we won't have that kind of error. It was only about a dozen towns that made that mistake, but that tells us that there is a training issue in a dozen towns. Even that, out of 246 towns, it made a difference.

The other error that occurred that we discovered, was one town, without our knowledge, had been using two optical scan machines. One they used to process their absentee ballots in, the other was used for voters, and when they added the two numbers together, they dropped a one - so they lost 100 votes. Those votes were found in the recount. It would be a reason to let towns know that one optical scan machine in a precinct is sufficient, and that people have to check their math.

To the credit of this particular town clerk, she did have more than one person do the addition and check it, and they didn't catch it. And, of course, as people had worked hard all day, it wasn't surprising that errors happen.

VBM: In the end it was decided by very few votes.

Markowitz: Just a couple of hundred votes. It really shows that every vote counts. It was a big surprise to people. Vermont doesn't usually turn out incumbents. It was a good year for Democrats, and Tom Salmon has a great name, he started with some good name recognition, and the truth is, as you go further down the ballot to offices like Secretary of State or Auditor or Treasurer, people don't really know what we do. When it comes time to make these decisions, maybe they didn't know what Randy Brock did, so it was easy to swing that vote to Salmon. In any event, it was very close.