Preliminary Results from the 51st
By RHarrison | 2 June 2007 | 51st HOD District | 1 Comment
NOTE: This is a corrected version of an earlier post. Rather than leave incorrect information out on the web, I’ve opted to correct the entire post. This is going to be a complicated situation, so I want to keep the facts as clear as I can.
We have some early results from the 51st District Republican convention. (The fact that these are “early” 9 hours after the convention started should have all of you worried.)
Faisal Gill has the most votes, at the moment. Not Larry Sabato has the details.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Apparently, there was an overvote in three precincts. One of these went heavily for Gill, one for Lucas and one was basically a wash. The RPV was asked for a ruling, and the word came back that if this irregularity could not be rectified, then the results from the three precincts would have to be thrown out. Doing so will keep Gill in the lead, but by less than his current 6 weighted vote margin.
There are also early reports of irregularities within the vote. I heard one story where the same person signed two different delegate forms - but the signatures didn’t match. So, the convention asked this person to sign an affidavit stating that he was the person who filled out the delegate form, which he did. Except that signature didn’t match either of the first two. He voted.
The next step is to have the results sent to the 10th District Committee, where they can be thrown out if the Committee find that there have been too many irregularities. I suspect the Committee will be considering all of the strange things that have happened in this race, including a series of odd decisions made by the credentials committee, Tom Kopko accepting money from Gill, and the problems at the convention itself.
It looks like Kopko has run another impressive convention.
More details as we get them.
UPDATE (Greg L): Bill Black clarifies some points regarding the delegate with the multiple signatures:
This is not correct. I personally witness and participated in the Credentials committee vote/directive to retrieve this person’s credential. It was done mainly because someone witnessed the person saying that they had NOT signed either of the two forms. The rule states that you had to sign your own form. Since the person stated that neither of the original forms had his signature, we voted to VOID his badge. Mike May went to get it, and the badge was destroyed, which I personally witnessed. The weakness in the check in/credentialing procedure was that the check in personnel were not adequately trained to handle these “Sworn Statements” and this was caught only by the diligence of an observer. The Lucas campaign had moved early in the credential deliberation meetings last week to have all the “Sworn Statements” handled by the Help Desk. We were voted down. The Help Desk was manned by voting credential personnel, where knowledge of all of the filing irregularities existed. I’m sure you will hear about many other problems that occurred during this convention, however. This one didn’t happen exactly the way you presented it.
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I believe that a protest would be filed in the 11th, not the 10th ConDis.