Misplaced town election ballots counted; override still passes
Town Clerk Kandy Lavallee presented the Select Board with the results of the morning count of the 202 ballots found in the vault a week after the election: in short there are no changes.
The $4 million override question, Question 2 on the ballot, was the only race on the ballot that could have been affected by the count. Final results: Yes 1,781 , no 1,682.
A final tally of the results has yet to be posted by the clerk’s office. Lavallee told the Select Board that the process was continuing as of 2 p.m.
Thursday morning at 11 a.m., the ballots were removed from the humble blue box where they had rested in the vault and handed off to eight poll workers, who paired off behind plexiglass, masked, with hand sanitizer at the ready.
The murmuring of names in the Select Board conference room was constant as the stacks of envelopes were opened.
“Spinney, Wood, Durand, Concaugh.”
“Question One, yes, Question Two, yes.”
“No votes on the back.”
“We have a write-in.”
The envelopes, containing early mailed ballots left behind in the Town Clerk’s vault in the June 23 election, numbered 202, all from Precinct 2. They were discovered Tuesday afternoon, just a week after election tapped two new Select Board members, Mathew Often and Colleen Roy, and passed a $4 million override of Proposition 2 1/2.
Life has been complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In Grafton, it meant a delayed Town Meeting that ended up outdoors on Grafton High School’s football field on June 20. The annual town election also fell victim to delay — and the sheer number of mailed-in early ballots, allowed by the state to cut down the chance of COVID-19 infection at the polls, apparently caused a mix-up that not only affects Grafton’s town election results, but also raises questions about how it may affect the November election.
An independent investigation into the snafu will be made.
