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Thursday, March 28, 2024
Councillor Minka vanBeuzekom is asking to let a roundtable be televised. A previous request failed.

Councillor Minka vanBeuzekom has called for a recount of the Nov. 5 election.

City councillor Minka vanBeuzekom has filed for a recount of the Nov. 5 election, she said after the council’s Monday meeting.

She said she filed with 150 signatures, although only 50 were needed under the rules of the city’s Election Commission. “People were saying, ‘Oh, please, I want to sign,’” vanBeuzekom said, and the list of signers included some “interesting” names, including fellow councillor David Maher.

The Election Commission’s executive director, Tanya Ford, said Tuesday that she got the petition the previous day. The commission was meeting to look at logistics for the recount, but when the recount would begin and where and how it would be held weren’t set. There is a public commission meeting at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday.

The one-term incumbent seemed to lose her seat on the next two-year council term in the vote counts that took place Nov. 5-6 and Friday. There was a gap of six transfer voters between vanBeuzekom and challenger Nadeem Mazen, but the gap widened to 14 during a reshuffle Friday after the count of provisional and overseas ballots. The gap between vanBeuzekom and challenger Dennis Carlone stayed at 13 – or, with 17,743 ballots cast, a 0.07 difference.

A recount in 2001 took two weeks to get through, which might be problematic in this case: A recount has to start within 10 days of the filing, but one that is slow to start and takes that long to finish will be complicated by the Thanksgiving holiday and possibly the Dec. 10 special election to fill Ed Markey’s seat in the 5th Congressional District. “They probably won’t want to break it up,” vanBeuzekom said, eyeing the Thanksgiving holiday.

But based on a conversation she referred to between she and Ford, vanBeuzekom believed a recount will go faster than it did in 2001. Despite the aging of the computer equipment, the commission has a new method for matching ballots, she said. And this recount will be another chance to see how the process can be improved.

“I really think this will be beneficial for the process,” she said.

Reeves

Reeves

Incumbent Ken Reeves, who finished further behind vanBeuzekom in the vote count, was not contemplating a recount of his own results. Instead, he was thinking about how he might want to spend his newly free time come January – aside from watching to see the results of the voters’ choices at the polls, where the four challengers elected marked the most coming aboard at one time in many council terms.

“I’ve been here for 24 years, I’ve worked as hard as I know how … and the city’s never been in better shape,” Reeves said. “I’m off to a new beginning, and that’s, I think, good for me.”

“So no lament here,” Reeves said.

This post was updated Nov. 19, 2013, to reflect information from Ford and correct information from vanBeuzekom about the date of filing.