A behind-the-scenes error earlier this month led officials in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to wrongly include more than 2,000 test ballots in early local election results that were released to the public, only to announce a different candidate had likely won a key school policy seat than the original announced frontrunner.
On November 5, election officials in the leafy city, home to Harvard University and MIT, first released unofficial election tallies.
Though they warned the public the initial figures were provisional, former public school teacher Eugenia Schraa Huh prepared to celebrate the seeming election victory she had won over the incumbent David J. Weinstein in the race for a seat on the School Committee.
“I was told I should not have been worried,” she told The Boston Globe. “But this was something out of left field.”
Her husband even put a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator, in anticipation of the official victory in the city’s ranked-choice voting system being announced.
“He jinxed it,” she added in her interview with the paper.
Two days later, the city announced revised unofficial results, these showing that Weinstein was in fact slated to retake the seat.
Cambridge officials explained that an unnamed vendor accidentally left testing ballots in with official ones, inadvertently adding 2,158 votes to the city’s overall total.
“Preliminary unofficial results are made available by the Election Commission to the community, media organizations, and other interested individuals as soon as they are available on Election Night,” the city’s Election Commission said in a statement. “However, results are subject to change as additional ballots are counted and tallies are confirmed through a series of checks and balances. As a result of this thorough auditing process, a discrepancy associated with the test ballots was discovered.”
Once officials went back and removed the test ballots, Schraa Huh’s 115-vote lead over Weinstein turned into a 95-ballot deficit, the only race and ballot question whose results were impacted by the switch.
Schraa Huh has reportedly been considering calling for a recount, a process that would require collecting signatures from the public first.
