The Cambridge City Council and School Committee 2025 municipal election results were confirmed Wednesday, matching corrected results announced on Friday Nov. 7, with David Weinstein taking the final spot on the School Committee ahead of Eugenia Schraa Huh.
How an error in the preliminary unofficial results happened is being investigated by the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Elections Division.
It is clear that digital files were mixed up in Cambridge’s Elections Management System (EMS), known as RTR. Test ballots from Oct. 20 were counted that should not have been, and mail-in ballots scanned on Oct. 31 were not counted but should have been.
“Test deck data being included in election results is rare, as the issue would typically be caught with the printing of a zero tape.” said Debra O’Malley, spokesperson for Secretary of the Commonwealth William Francis Galvin. But Cambridge’s problem “originated with the Election Night reporting software used with a high-speed central tabulator, not with a precinct tabulator. Since these have only been used in recent years and are typically only used by larger cities, there is limited precedent for this type of error.”
“The posting of unofficial citywide results on Election Night is not required or regulated by state law,” O’Malley said, and “it is not a formal investigation under Chapter 56 Section 60 of the General Laws,” unlike the 2024 investigation into Boston’s ballot shortages during the presidential election.
“We have been in correspondence with the Commonwealth’s Elections Division,” said Jeremy Warnick, a spokesperson for the city of Cambridge.
What went wrong?
Cambridge’s Election Management System (EMS) uses software from Dominion Voting Systems. On election night, digital records of ballot data are merged into the city’s EMS by a technician from LHS Associates, the Massachusetts reseller for Dominion. The ranked choice software is then run to calculate the winners.
The digital ballot data includes election-day votes from memory cards on the 66 precinct tabulator machines, two for each of Cambridge’s 33 precincts. That data is merged with mail-in votes from a high-speed central tabulator machine that tabulated mail-in votes from seven precincts on Oct. 31, the Friday before Election Day. The remaining advance mail-in ballots are inserted into the precinct tabulators at each precinct on Election Day, except for those that arrive late on Election Day, which are processed during the three following days.
But because of a technician’s error, the data in Cambridge’s EMS included test data from Oct. 20, and also did not include all of the mail-in data from Oct. 31. When Cambridge initially announced the error on Nov. 7, it said the problem was only about test deck data, and appeared to be unaware that the mail-in ballot data was missing. The remaining advance mail-in ballots are inserted into the precinct tabulators at each precinct on Election Day, except for those that arrive late on Election Day which are processed during the three following days.
Cambridge said LHS was to blame. “Through its proactive auditing process, the Election Commission determined that ballots used for testing were not fully cleared from the Election Management System by the vendor in advance of the Municipal Election on November 4, 2025,” the city said in a statement.
LHS’s Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Silvestro, declined to comment, saying: “I’ve given my account to the city.”
Asked for a copy of its auditing procedures, the city’s legal department said it had no such documentation: “the City has no responsive records.” But on Wednesday Nov. 12, the city released auditing numbers that told a different story, other than test ballots. In the auditor’s spreadsheet, there was disagreement in all precincts (not just those with advance processing), and in some races and precincts there were fewer ballots than expected, but in others there were more. That problem could not be explained solely by the addition of test deck ballots.
“The only precincts with positive numbers were those with advanced processing, implying that in some cases, test deck batches were uploaded instead of the advanced processing batches,” said Lesley Waxman, the assistant director of the elections department.
“As evidenced by the auditor’s spreadsheets, once LHS removed the high-speed scanner data and reimported it correctly with only the advanced processing ballots and not the test deck ballots, all of the numbers in RTR [the Election Management System] matched the tapes. That happened without LHS knowing what numbers we were looking for, so it is not something that can have happened by chance and gives us confidence that all of the ballots reflected on the tapes are now reflected in the results,” Waxman said.
Who knew what when?
Cambridge’s four-member Board of Election Commissioners has been closed-mouthed about when they were told by the staff of the elections department about the problems with election night results.
Warnick, the city spokesperson, said “the possibility of a discrepancy was identified Tuesday night,” but the department gave the data to the commissioners who voted on its release anyhow.
Tom Stohlman, a Democratic member of the commission from West Cambridge, said he learned of the anomalies three days later at the November 7 meeting of the commission, when executive director Tanya Ford publicly told the board.
Larry Ward, chairman of the board, as well as commissioners Ethridge King and Charles Marquardt, declined to comment.
Stohlman said the city’s statement on Nov. 7 “was the most detail I had on what had happened Election Night until I went to the Election Office the next business day (Monday) and asked about what had happened.”
That statement was “issued without discussion or a vote of the Commission,” Stohlman said.
The elections department investigated the anomalies on the morning of Wednesday Nov. 5, around 11:18 a.m., and re-ran the elections showing the flip from Schraa Huh to Weinstein. After that change was known by department staff, the information made it to the city manager’s office who called Schraa Huh about it, according to Ford’s narrative from the Nov. 7 meeting.
The city has not answered repeated questions about why the city manager’s office was informed days before the board; why election results were released outside the normal vote of the four commissioners; or who precisely told Schraa Huh or the propriety of that communication.
At the Nov. 14 meeting of the commission, where provisional ballots were adjudicated and overseas absentee ballots counted – giving a final total showing 37.8 percent of Cambridge’s 67,823 voters voted – Ford told the board her staff was preparing a written report about the problem, which she had hoped to have that day but was not yet ready. The board opted not to open its discussion of the situation until it had the report, and it did not respond to questions about the process.
Ford said at the meeting this past Wednesday, Nov. 19, that she hoped to have that report by the Dec. 3 meeting.
Stohlman asked Ford to provide copy of report in advance, but Ford seemed to suggest she would not be able to legally provide the report before the meeting, although it would be a public record when provided.
Typically meeting agenda packets with supplementary materials for Election Commission meetings are available by email request shortly before the meeting, but are not publicly posted in advance.
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Thank you John for following up on this important story.
Clearly there needs to be some accountability from Ms Ford.