Recount Weekend Open Notebook (Updated: Saturday, 5 p.m.)
Jermoh Kamara needs hands on deck and cash on hand!!
It’s Recount Weekend baby!! What will come of the 23 vote space between Jermoh Kamara and Moe Bergman for the last at-large council seat? That is the question.
I’ll be on scene the whole weekend and posting updates to this thread. The first update—and the reason i’m putting this post up now—is the “chat” I tried to “send as an email” with crucial hyperlinks that completely disappeared when I hit send. (I need to leave Substack yesterday.)
If you want to follow along, best to have the web version of this post open in your browser.
Also I’m three subscribers away from 5,000 so share this post with a friend?
Friday 7 p.m.
I need more time on my post for this week (really excited about it, pretty crazy week for cranks telling on themselves)
So I’m using this here chat feature to let you all to know that the recount this weekend is a big deal. Jermoh Kamara is up against a lot and Bergman is already getting nasty with his rhetoric, as are his chirping supporters... which include some of the worst police officers on the force. Yeesh.
Here’s a link to volunteer and contribute to her recount fund. I sent $25 - someone want to match it?? Legal representation for this process is not cheap. I texted Kamara ahead of getting this out and she said the donations are the big thing right now. Here’s a link straight to the donation portal.
There are two ballot counting sessions, one saturday and one sunday, she needs observers for both. Both are at North High from 8:30 a.m. to ????
Saturday agenda
I’ll be there as media at least part of the day Saturday and all day Sunday.
Ok more soon just wanted to get that out there. Have a good weekend everyone! --Bill
ACT BLUE FOR DONATIONS // VOLUNTEER FORM /INFO
Saturday, 5:30 p.m.
Back from spending the first half of the day in the North High gym. Got roped into being an official observer, an experience that was interesting: felt like a perfect 50/50 blend of going to church and going to the RMV. Three hours of watching two people count five ballots at a time, manually punching in totals with rulers and guides to a large paper spreadsheet.
Anyone watching Pluribus? Had a bit of a Pluribus vibe to it. Hundreds of people drudging through a monotonous task in a weirdly choreographed unison. Pretty interesting. I didn’t personally catch any ballots that were in error in any way, but in looking at individual ballot after individual ballot, I did witness a lot of strange, asymmetrical choices. One Mitra-Kamara-King-Rosen-Toomey combination, for instance. Davis-Colorio-Pepple-Bergman-Owura was another stunner. One for Cayden Davis only, but Joe Petty for mayor. One that was blank save for a “yes” on Mero-Carlson’s stupid ballot question on whether residents are in favor of the city doing something it can’t do.
People are all over the place with their votes, man. It doesn’t make a lick of sense. A nice reminder, as Jeuji Diamondstone and I were discussing at the lunch break, that the electorate is a hell of a lot more random than we might like to think of it. To even tack a political spectrum on top of it—crank v progressive, left v right, new v old—may be missing the forest for the trees. But I’ll stop myself before I go too far down that road.
It was a rouge’s gallery of cranks in that gymnasium. I spent an hour shoulder to shoulder with former police chief Steven Sargent, there as a Bergman volunteer, taking direction from Bergman’s recount organizer, Brendan Early. I was just out of earshot of a few scheming conspiratorial conversations Early was having with Candy Mero-Carlson, there like I was as an official observer, but talking through much of it, which isn’t allowed per se but was mostly permitted. I got a bigger tongue lashing from the Kamara campaign director for momentarily taking my eyes off a ballot than any of the chatty Kathys on the crank side got from people in the clerk’s office.
Oh also: Steve Quist immediately reported me for using a cell phone—a fact I gathered after the two poll workers who came up to me to say “no cell phones” went straight back to Quist to report their findings. (I was writing in a notebook.) Must be interference from smart meters that makes a notebook look like a phone. I hear flouride also clouds vision in that specific way. I read it on Facebook so
At lunch, spirits were high in the Kamara camp. Rallying supporters after supplying the team with a Little Ceasars Lunch, Kamara said “We need this. We need this. You know what this means for Worcester. Thank you so much.”
I was happy to be relieved by a new crop of volunteers and around 2 p.m. left the gymnasium.
Tomorrow the count will go from 8:30 a.m. to at least 7:30 p.m. (possibly longer). The Kamara team needs more volunteers!! If you have time tomorrow, show up either before 8:30 or around 1:30. There’s a lunch break from 1-2, when a new crop of observers are allowed into the Pluribus Pen as I like to call it where the magic of the hand count continues to happen.
We should know the results by tomorrow evening.
ACT BLUE FOR DONATIONS // VOLUNTEER FORM /INFO
Next update tomorrow morning barring anything unforseen tonight.
Please consider helping this outlet sustain itself and hopefully grow!
And join the chat it looks like people are already going to be Recount Posting in there!
Donated!
Done☑️