A recount in Massachusetts flipped a state House seat from Republican to Democrat by a single vote.
According to CBS Boston, five-term Republican incumbent Rep. Lenny Mirra had a 10 vote lead over Democrat Kristin Kassner after the November midterm election.
Massachusetts secretary of state, Bill Galvin ordered a hand recount on November 30 since Mirra’s lead was within the legal threshold to trigger a recount.
By the time officials finished recounting the ballots last Thursday the result flipped and put Kassner in the lead by a single vote, 11,763 to 11,762. Kassner picked up 19 votes during the recount while Mirra picked up 9 and lost one.
Five voters chose other candidates in the race and 638 left that field blank, Galvin’s office said.
[Photos via State House News Service]
Mirra plans to challenge the results of the election.
“Some ballots were filled out in pencil, some were filled out with different colored ink, some had stray marks. Some had a name written in the write-in and then an oval filled out,” he told the Boston Globe.
Kassner, meanwhile, told CBS she is “not suspicious of anything that ever happened.”
“[The recount] was just really just to ensure that, between humans and machines, we really caught every vote that was counted,” she added. “We thank the tremendous outpouring of people that really got involved and mobilized to go through this process this weekend. It’s really a true test of democracy.”
Massachusetts voted earlier this year to make mail-in voting permanent and expand early voting. Mirra and other Republicans opposed the measures. They were nevertheless signed into law by Republican Gov. Charlie Baker.
If Kassner’s lead holds, Democrats would pickup four seats in the midterms giving then control of 133 of the state’s 160 House districts.
