A hand recount shows that Simsbury voters overwhelmingly approved a multimillion-dollar land deal in their town Tuesday evening, after a ballot preparation error led to thousands of votes not getting recorded by a machine tabulator.
Voters cast ballots in a budget referendum, deciding whether the town should authorize more than $2.5 million in taxpayer money to buy 288 acres of land called “Meadowood.”
Karen Cortés, Simsbury’s Democratic registrar of voters, said the Meadowood question “passed overwhelmingly,” with 3,022 voting yes on the authorization and 439 voting no.
If the deal is finalized, in a complex arrangement involving state, federal and local money, the Meadowood property would be transferred from a private developer to the town. The sale will nix a long-stalled housing development at the site and instead maintain some existing farmland and create space for outdoor recreation.
Supporters also billed Meadowood as a historical vote: Its passage would preserve old barns and set aside land to commemorate Martin Luther King Jr., who worked on the site’s old tobacco fields as a teenager in the 1940s.
Simsbury First Selectman Eric Wellman said Wednesday morning that turnout for Tuesday’s vote was high -- around 3,500 people, or about 18.5% of the town’s electors.
Then, the problems started.
“At the end of the night the tabulator spits out the numbers, which basically looks like a long receipt,” Wellman said. “When it got to question number 6, which is the Meadowood question … there were no results provided. So we knew something went wrong.”
Cortés said nothing went wrong with the tabulator; she blamed a ballot preparation error involving the small bubbles voters fill in on a ballot.
She said the bubbles for Question 6 weren’t lined up correctly, so when the ballots were printed and used by voters, the machine couldn’t read the tally for that question.
“When you go to vote, you’re filling in ovals on your ballot. On our ballot order, the ovals were slightly misaligned just for Question 6,” Cortés said.
“There are, for lack of a better word, ‘tick marks’ along the side of the ballot. And the ovals were placed one set of tick marks off in the printing process,” Cortés said.
Cortés said officials “immediately knew they had an issue” Tuesday night and opened up a second tabulator to run all of the ballots through again. She said vote counts for other referendum questions remained accurate, but votes on Question 6 again were not read.
That kicked off a manual recount, involving multiple poll workers from both the Democratic and Republican parties, which resulted in the final numbers announced Wednesday afternoon.
The Meadowood project could have died a quiet death after the Simsbury finance board decided in early April not to advance it to a townwide referendum.
But then the issue evolved at the bureaucratic equivalent of lightspeed, fueled by a citizen-driven petition that hoisted the land deal from the graveyard of town government to a town meeting and then to the ballot box, all in just a matter of days.
Cortés said the speedy process made running the referendum complicated.
“It really compacted the amount of time that we had to prepare for this,” Cortés said. “We did do [pre-referendum] testing, and in our haste we missed that the Question 6 wasn’t reading properly.”
“We made a mistake. We caught it. We fixed it,” Cortés said. “We had 10 days to get everything ready for this budget referendum, and in the meantime we were also preparing for the town meeting that was held to get ready for this.”
This story was updated.
