The “preliminary unofficial” election results that Cambridge released on election night were incorrect and improperly included data from the “test deck” of ballots that are routinely used to test machine function before the election. That mistakenly gave the sixth place School Committee win to the wrong candidate.
David Weinstein beat out Eugenia Schraa Huh in Friday’s tally.
On Tuesday night, Schraa Huh beat out Weinstein by 2,744 to 2,629 (or 115 votes) in the 13th round of the count in city’s ranked-choice balloting system. But on Friday, Weinstein beat Schraa Huh by 2,761 to 2,666 (95 votes) in the 14th round.
“Some things have changed,” said Tanya Ford, executive director of the Cambridge Election Commission, at 5:56 p.m. Friday, speaking to the four appointed members of the commission at the end of the count. The commission meeting coincided with the count of ballots that were not processed on Election Day – the count and meeting ran from 9 a.m. until early evening each day Wednesday through Friday of this week.
But before Ford’s announcement to the commission at its public meeting, the City Manager’s Office “reached out to Schraa Huh and Weinstein without me knowing,” Ford told them. “I don’t know what was said.”
“I assume you expressed our dissatisfaction with that,” commissioner Charles Marquardt told Ford.
After the meeting, Ford could be heard talking on the phone to Weinstein, who had not been previously informed. Ford was surprised to learn he was hearing this for the first time.
Ford also told the commissioners at the meeting that “the plan” was that she was supposed to tell candidates privately before the results were publicly released, but that did not happen either.
The test deck included 1,370 additional ballots for the School Committee, 632 additional ballots for the City Council and 156 additional ballots for a charter change question, the city said in a statement dated 6:42 p.m. It is not apparent exactly how many of those test votes affected the Schraa Huh-Weinstein outcomes, nor how many did so in which rounds.
The city’s press release also said the error was identified “through its proactive auditing process,” but the error was not identified proactively before the election night results release – it was identified after the release of results, and not disclosed publicly until Friday night.
Normal process
The normal process is that the preliminary unofficial results on election night include only ballots processed by machine on Election Day as well as mail-in ballots processed by machine the Friday before.
Any other ballot is considered an auxiliary ballot and is processed in the days after election night. That includes ballots with a write-in; with a stray mark; with an overvote, in which a voter has marked two candidates with the same rank, or ranked one candidate with two ranks; mail-in ballots that arrived on Election Day too late to be sent to the polls; or a blank ballot.
There were 3,153 such auxiliary School Committee ballots, according to the commission’s tally sheets.
Overall, the commission reported a total of 25,317 committee ballots in Friday’s count, up from 23,366 on Tuesday night’s count, a difference of 1,951.
The Friday results are still not final, but are unlikely to change significantly. On Nov. 14, the Election Commission will tabulate the results from overseas absentee ballots, which have a deadline that day, and can trickle in more slowly. In past years, there have been only a handful of such ballots, perhaps 20. The commission did not have an estimate of the number of such ballots available Friday, but said they expected to have that information next week.
This post was updated Nov. 8. 2025, to correct phrasing around the difference in counts in the second-to-last paragraph.
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This is a complete fiasco. The Tuesday night “preliminary” results are suppose to be preliminary because there still some ballots they need to count, not because they miscounted the ballots they already had.
1) There should be a full recount of the election. Given that they already messed this up once, they need to redo the count so we can have confidence.
2) There should be an independent investigation (led by the secretary of state?) on how this happened. If this happened in a statewide or national election, people would be using this (incorrectly) as evidence of fraud. We need our results to be trustworthy and beyond reproach.
3) The executive director of the election commission needs to take responsibility and resign. That is the honorable thing to do.
4) Finally, the city owes a huge apology to David and Eugenia for this mess.
Bummer. Seems like a loss for the committee. Eugenia seemed thoughtful and willing to call out BS. This guy is just seems like a progressive turnstile