Elections Supervisor: Recount Cost Tax Payers Over $18,000

The 2014 General Election recount on St. Croix, which was requested by former Sen. Alicia “Chucky” Hansen and other candidates, came with a price tag of more than $18,000 for tax payers, Elections Supervisor Caroline Fawkes said.

Fawkes said the cost includes eight days of work for board members, the videographer that recorded the recount, as well as talliers.

While then-Board Vice Chair Lilliana Belardo De O’Neal told VI Consortium that other candidates, aside from Hansen, had requested a recount, including former Sen. Diane Capehart, former senatorial candidate Naomi Joseph and former BOE candidate Epiphane Joseph, the latter candidate said neither he nor Capehart made such requests.

However, it was Hansen’s request that garnered the most attention — and took the longest to tally — as all her ballots, including her many aliases, were both hand-counted and parsed to determine how many of those aliases would be used.

As for her reasons for requesting a recount of the ballots, Hansen listed various “inconsistencies” with the first count, from alleged reprogrammed jump drives to missing write-in votes.

“Every vote should be counted and respected,” Hansen stated, “and within that petition, I listed various reasons [for the recount].”

She continued, “Among them ballots not counted, differences between the computer count and subsequent actual count, ballots erroneously counted, ballots not counted because of the failure to darken the bubble even though the intent of the voter is clear, ballots not counted because of an issue with the name despite the fact that the intent is clear, failure to count ballots not tabulated by the DS200, even though a hand count would have cast those ballots for me.

“Ballots that have gone missing before being counted, ballot bins coming in the Elections Board without their security seal; jump drives from voting tabulation that were reprogrammed–and so there are about 14 items and irregularities that took place with those write-in votes. And we want to know what happened to the over 5,000 write-ins that came in on behalf of Alicia “Chucky” Hansen.”

While the St. Croix District board granted Hansen the recount, lawsuits brought against it by Sen. Nereida “Nellie” Rivera-O’Reilly, challenging the board’s decision to grant the recount, saw Hansen being denied twice. First, by the Superior Court of the Virgin Islands when Judge Harold Willocks, who deemed the already-recounted ballots “null and void” and then by the Supreme Court of the Virgin Islands, following an appeal of the Superior Court’s decision by Hansen.