Dozens of “missing” votes from the Ward 5 Statehood Green primary are likely to be found in illegitimate Democratic Party ballots, according to the Board of Elections and Ethics.
Philip Blair, the losing Statehood Green candidate in the Ward 5 D.C. Council primary, is too late to challenge what he claims were voting irregularities at the polls, but the elections board is moving forward with an investigation nevertheless.
The board certified only 89 votes in the Party’s Sept. 12 Ward 5 primary. Blair lost to Carolyn Steptoe 40-33, with the remaining 16 writing in another name.
But Blair claims 140 Statehood Green Party voters actually signed in at the polls, leaving 51 ballots unaccounted for. And it is “sheer rotten incompetence” that the board failed to properly certify every vote, he said.
It appears many of the “missing” votes are not missing at all, but were incorrectly cast — and counted — in the Democratic primary, Kenneth McGhie, elections board general counsel, said. With poll workers averaging about 70 years old,McGhie said, they “get confused and hand out the wrong ballot.”
It’s a problem that creeps up every election, he said, as minority party voters demand, and receive, Democratic ballots — in many minds the only ballots that count. But the D.C. primary is closed, meaning only party members can vote.
“If they insisted, they should have given them a provisional ballot, and then we wouldn’t have counted it,” McGhie said.
In his “mind-jellying” investigation of the poll books, Blair said, he found similar issues with Republican votes, problems he chalked up to last-minute address or political party changes and even voting machine errors.
The statutory period for challenging election results ended Oct. 3, McGhie wrote in an Oct. 11 letter to Blair. But an investigation is under way to “ensure that, if any such irregularity did occur, it will not be repeated in further contests.”
