Votes were counted Friday, October 25th at Teamsters 695, 1314 N Stoughton Rd in Madison. Rebuild 695 brought observers: Andy Sernatinger, Sonci Stone, Nikki Sampson and Matt Sarenich; rank and file member Eric Johnson also came to observe. Wayne Schultz Slate had staff members Brian and Sandy as their primary observers; Rick Roeth and Bill Roeth were present for most of the count as well.

1097 ballots were cast in the election. Merriman-River began by scanning the outside barcode on every ballot to make sure that they were eligible to vote before opening the envelopes for the vote tally. The Teamster dues system (TITAN) automatically challenged 73 ballots on the basis of their dues not being up to date. Rebuild 695 issued challenges for 4 ballots on the basis of receiving returned undeliverable mail for our campaign literature when they were still able to cast a ballot. There was overlap between one of the Rebuild ballots and the TITAN challenges, for a total of 76 challenged ballots. One ballot was sent in using a personal envelope instead of the official return mail and was disqualified by the election agent (never opened).

Challenged ballots were held aside in case the margin was close, at which point the slates would attempt to resolve which ballots were eligible — these ballots were never opened as the margin of victory was larger than the number of ballots (opening them wouldn’t change the result of the election).

1020 ballots were then opened by Merriman-River, had their anonymous votes taken out and placed in a box to be counted. 994 ballots were counted through the ballot scanner; 23 ballots had to be hand counted because they were not able to be fed through the scanner. 3 ballots were void: there was a blank ballot, a ballot with identifiable writing and one with both sides marked.

The majority of ballots were slate ballots, though there were many ballots which were marked for individual candidates in both slates — some ballots did not mark for every office. The margin of victory for the Schultz Slate was greater than the number of challenge ballots (73), so the challenges did not need to be resolved and those ballots were not opened. The results are below (ST 1 is the machine count, ST 2 is the hand count, Total is machine + hand count).

We’ll write up some thoughts on these results later, but as many are surely curious we wanted to make sure this information was out ASAP.