Q&A: Deborah Markowitz, Secretary of State

Vermont Business Magazine, Feb 01, 2007

VBM: A couple hundred votes difference out of a quarter of a million votes is close.

Markowitz: That's right, it fell to about 102 votes, and that made the difference. And it also shows that there's a good reason to have recounts. I know Tom Salmon called our office and asked, "Should I do it? I don't know if I should do it." Our election director said that in her view, if the difference is more than 250 votes, it's probably not worth it. And while it's not likely to change, it makes sense to ask for the recount. He'll never know otherwise. And it was certainly the right choice in this case.

VBM: It was a shocker. I couldn't believe it. I've interviewed Randy, and Tom has been a friend for years, so I was following it pretty closely.

Markowitz: The other amazing piece is how many people it takes to conduct a recount. In every county every single ballot is hand counted twice. It's a very precise process where there's a person counting, a person calling, and a person marking, and they are being observed by another pair. They are bipartisan pairs, so that the Republican or Democrat observing sits down and recounts that pile. So every pile of 50 votes is counted twice, and you've got to get the same number every time. Every one of those four have to agree on voter intent on every ballot. That was done pretty efficiently here. It's a tribute to a great many people, especially the county clerks who had to arrange it all.

VBM: So coming out of this, what kind of voting do you prefer? What do you think is the most accurate?

Markowitz: I actually think that a hand count is perfectly appropriate for smaller towns. It's very accurate. There's always an opportunity for human error no matter how you do it. As we've seen here, in one case 100 votes were inadvertently left out of an addition problem. In other cases there was a clerical error in a sense. The point is that humans run our elections, whether you're using machines or not. There does come a point though, when towns become big enough that they ought to be considering optical scan machines. We actually had 24 towns call us since the recount asking about optical scan machines. I do think that we'll have some of those towns that had been wavering decide to go with the optical scanners.

People really like getting together and counting votes, so boards of civil authority do feel like you're taking something fun away from them. You are, but maybe it's the right thing to do.

VBM: Do you think there was a problem at all with the ballots, that people thought they were voting for one person when they were actually voting for someone else, which has been a complaint about some of the ballots in other states.

Markowitz: That did not happen here at all. The voting and the counting were accurate. The problem was when the tallies were moved from the individual tally to the central tally. The ballots were fine, people were voting fine on the ballots.

VBM: You mentioned the Centennial Business Awards. Are they a little up in the air right now?