Holmes challenges election results

PALMER — Doyle Holmes has filed a second formal challenge against the unofficial election results at Tuesday's special assembly meeting.

Those results show Holmes lost Tuesday's race for the seat being vacated by term-limit constrained assembly member, now mayor-elect Vern Halter by 33 votes to Randall Kowalke. Holmes’ challenge to the election results raises questions surrounding the results from Talkeetna precincts, which he has repeatedly labeled suspicious. Holmes lost Talkeetna 135 votes to 51 votes (with two write-ins). Holmes’ complaint is asking the board to check serial numbers on the bottom of ballots to ensure they match those issued at the polling place, and that the borough clerk be excluded from investigating the election results because she was a material witness.

He also raised concerns about a gap between when the canvassing board certified absentee, question, and special needs ballots and the counting by the review board. The canvass board rejected the latter claim because it didn’t address a specific set of ballots.

Officials hadn’t checked whether serial numbers on the ballots matched those handed in by Talkeetna, and Holmes’ complaint asked them to double check after what Holmes said were substantial deviations from procedures ordained by borough code.

"If the only thing that happens is it never happens again, I'd be happy with that," he said.

Holmes went from about 130 votes up to 52 votes up to 33 votes down over successive counts as additional votes were counted. The race was complicated by a long-standing feud between candidates that found its way into the Palmer courts.

No one should have any questions about whether the results were correctly tabulated or not, Holmes said.

Holmes’ challenge focuses on a delay with a Talkeetna voting machine that took place sometime on the night of the election. A single polling place unit typically contains two components: a box to hold the ballots and a machine which scans the ballots as they are deposited inside, responsible for keeping a running tally throughout the evening and with producing numbers used in the unofficial results. When the ballots are counted, officials run an ender card through the machine, which signals the end of the count.

The Talkeetna machine suffered an apparent mechanical malfunction — McKechnie said the precise nature of the issue would require an AccuVote technician to identify — and stopped accepting ballots sometime during Election Day. Holmes’ complaint lists the time as 4:30 p.m. Election officials put the time after 5:30 p.m., but before the 7 p.m. close of polls.

Voters were unable to feed them into the machine via the top slot, but the bins on which the AccuVote unit rests has an emergency slot in the side for voters to submit their ballots manually without contributing to the electronic count. Talkeetna results were thus delayed until much later than other precincts on election night.

Officials followed standard sealing process for the precinct, McKechnie said. That involves removing all the ballots from the box and counting them to ensure they match a pen register, then placing them in a special heavy-duty envelope (known by the brand name Tyvek) and sealing them with a signed tamper-proof seal. Borough code requires two officials acting as a delivery team to deliver them to the clerk’s office “unless otherwise directed by the clerk.”

Later that night, acting on a request from McKechnie, Houston clerk Sonya Dukes-Hays said she drove up to retrieve the sealed envelopes and transport them to the Houston city hall, where she met McKechnie and deputy clerk Jamie Newman. Together, the three officials unsealed the envelope, passed them through the properly functioning Houston machine, along with an ender card, then resealed the ballots in another envelope. McKechnie and Newman later delivered them to the borough building.

Board director Geraldine Keeling said the move was undertaken to avoid a situation where some ballots were counted via machine and others weren’t. The completed Talkeetna results were posted around midnight.

“Two clerks ran all the Talkeetna ballots through a replacement AccuVote, and ran the ender card, while the third clerk counted signatures in Talkeetna’s precinct register,” she said. “The count matched.”

The numbers run through the machine in Houston also matched the numbers reported by Talkeetna voting officials in a standardized report known as a “Ballot Accountability Report,” Keeling said.

Holmes filed his challenge about 20 minutes before officials were expected to act on it.

Kowalke — who wore a suit with an American flag pin — was not sworn in with fellow assembly members-elect Barb Doty and George McKee. Despite his attire, Kowalke said he had not expected to be sworn in that evening.

“I think I mentioned a third act,” he said. “I used those words, and I also predicted the time. I was telling people today who were congratulating me saying they would come in to see me be sworn in, that about ten minutes to five, there would be a shock-and-awe.”

A supporter interrupted him at that point.

“Congratulations,” she said, then referred to a Holmes quote in the Alaska Dispatch News. “We do believe in the Tooth Fairy.

Kowalke said he would prevail, even if his swearing-in was less ceremonious.

“I’ll be done in one of these five-minute sessions before some meeting in the future,” he said. “It kind of takes sunshine off of it.”

That did not stop assembly members from congratulating him for an apparent electoral win throughout the special assembly meeting where the borough was expecting.

"I do wish Doyle Holmes would withdraw his challenge," said mayor-elect Vern Halter, at the start of remarks delivered directly after he took the oath of office. Members said they wished Holmes would withdraw his challenge, and congratulated Kowalke for an apparent win over the course of the special and regular assembly meetings that evening. Holmes departed immediately after the end of the special assembly meeting.

A withdrawal is out of the question, Holmes said. He disputed any claim that he was challenging the results over sour grapes, and said he’d expected the canvass board to examine and double-check ballots turned in by precincts, but was horrified to discover the canvass board accepted only counts.

“I want that bag of ballots opened up,” he said. “This has happened three times in Talkeetna, and something is astray. If it isn’t, then the public needs to know that.”

Borough attorney Nicholas Spiropoulos said a situation with a vacant seat at the borough assembly chambers was not without precedent, and expected a conference between him and Clerk Lonnie McKechnie within the next few days.

Assemblyman Jim Sykes later moved that an investigation be conducted, and Vern Halter successfully amended that motion to set an Oct. 27 deadline for the completion of any investigation. The motion passed unanimously.

During the evening’s regular assembly meeting, Spiropoulos said an investigative hearing was planned for 6 p.m. Thursday in the borough assembly chambers, and would be open to the public.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.