YACK on: Recount
Grant Sanders
Is it just me, or did we just go through a strange season of election after election after election? It seemed like every Tuesday there was something new to vote on. It feels strange this week to have not voted. To not be walking around with my pockets filled with hard candies. To not have three or four "I voted" stickers plastered on my fleece jacket like so many years' worth of beach-driving stickers on a bumper.

This last election was a doozy. I was there last Tuesday night, having just shopped for our annual Thanksgiving pigout extravaganza, and you could have cut the tension with a knife when the preliminary votes were announced and Patty Roggeveen was ahead of Catherine Stover by a full 40 votes. That seemed like way too huge a deficit for anyone to overcome. I was not the only person who thought so. I heard Catherine supporters groan and kvetch. And I saw people shaking Patty's hand, smiling and congratulating her.

But the fact of the matter is, there were 74 votes that the ballot machine rejected as unreadable because the votes cast were not drawn completely and neatly in the little oval. And when those were counted, Catherine had won by two votes (apparently, Catherine skews heavily toward voters with really awful penmanship skills).

It was a stunner. People actually gasped when Assistant Town Clerk, James Grieder, came out from behind the voting booths and read that after counting the rejected votes twice, Catherine had 803 votes and Patty had 801. I almost dropped my laptop which was precariously perched on a recycling bin in the high school hallway as I typed in the results and posted them to YACKon.com for a waiting throng of close to 80 users online.

Of course, one would expect Patty to ask for a recount. As is her right. It would seem like a statistical piece of cake for Ms. Roggeveen to pick up three votes. How hard could it be?

Perhaps harder than one thinks. Here are some interesting statistics with regards to recounts in close races on Nantucket.

Over the past 11 years, no one defeated in an election here has ever won in a recount. The closest was in 1995 when Pam Killen beat Vince Vacca by a scant four votes. In the recount, Vacca picked up .21 percent of the votes and Killen lost .10 percent but she still won by a single vote.

The largest gain for a loser in a BOS recount goes to Brian Chadwick with an increase of a whopping .32 percent of the vote. Almost a third of a percentage point, or four whole votes. Unfortunately for Brian, our old pal Doug Bennett picked up nine votes in the recount or nearly 3/4ths of a percentage point and he still won.

Patty Roggeveen needs to move the needle by .37 percent of the vote without Catherine gaining ground to win. That does not seem like a lot. But history has shown that it's quite a mountain to climb. Even Bud Clute who lost to Richard Bretschneider in the 1998 sheriff race could not win in a recount despite improving his standing by .68 percent.

The most interesting statistic of all also comes from 1998 when Georgia Snell beat Peter Wilson by just seven votes, but Mr. Wilson decided, in the end, that a recount would not be in the best interests of anyone, and he conceded.

My feeling is that Patty Roggeveen would be smart to do the same. From talking to people in the Clerk's office, it seems unlikely that the vote count will change given the relatively small number of "blank" ballots (less than one tenth of one percent) among the 2,000+ cast. Arecount will take a month or more to schedule, will cost the taxpayers between $2,500 and $3,000 and will require the time of up to 70 volunteers to give up a Saturday and count every vote several times. That's a lot of fuss for what would, if overturned, amount to Selectman service of around three months or less after all is said and done. Is it really worth it?

Then again, if Al Gore had stuck to his guns and demanded an investigation into the Florida elections of 2000, perhaps we would not be in the sorry state we currently face as a nation. So you never know.

I'm just glad my name wasn't on the ballot. If I had won, I'd surely have to ask for a recount.

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the host of YACK, The Nantucket Online Community at yackon.com and math is really not his strong suit. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of The Nantucket Independent.