The recounts come at the request of two candidates, Domingos DaRosa in the mayoral contest and Mavrick Afonso in the District 7 council race. Each finished third in their respective campaigns and collected signatures to force another tally in an effort to advance to the general election.
Saturday morning brought an unusual scene. Boston’s infamous brutalist governmental building was sandwiched between a large water main break that had closed Congress Street and dozens of horses happily munching on hay as workers on City Hall Plaza readied Boston’s first rodeo in a century.
Inside, a different horserace was expected to start at 9 a.m. with the beginning of the recount. But little appeared to happen for hours.
Around 30 election officials and volunteers sat quietly at folding tables set up on a lower level, armed with rulers and red pens as they prepared to count. And dozens of name-tag-spangled campaign volunteers milled about on an upper level, chomping on pizza as they waited to serve as observers at each table.
Some workers took out ballots and began to sort them in preparation for the recount. A few wore gloves as they opened up large gray boxes and removed manila envelopes, and then, in turn opened those envelopes to reveal the ballots.
But ultimately, after some time of sorting the ballots for counting — the recount is only happening for the political wards of the city where candidates seeking a new tally garnered enough signatures — Tavares dismissed everyone.
The water main break had knocked out the plumbing, meaning no toilets in City Hall were working, she told the crowd, gavel in hand. They’d try again Sunday, as long as the issue is fixed.
It’s unclear exactly how long the count will take, though a painstaking recount of the full city during the 2019 general election lasted three days, and less than a third of the city is being recounted here.
After Tavares’ announcement, Alfonso, who’s pushing for a recount in the District 7 race, rallied his supporters.
“We are invested in this process, and we will be back tomorrow,” he told the Globe a few minutes later.
In that race to succeed federally convicted Tania Fernandes Anderson on the Boston City Council, Afonso requested a recount after he trailed the second-place finisher by just 20 votes in the preliminary election earlier this month.
Afonso works for the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities. Former track and field star and current coach Said Ahmed earned 1,155 votes in the District 7 race last week, while attorney and senior pastor the Rev. Miniard Culpepper claimed 1,102 votes, according to the city’s unofficial tally. The two were set to advance to November’s general election, a result Afonso — who got 1,082 votes in the preliminary — is today contesting, given the tight margin between him and Culpepper.
On his way out of City Hall on Saturday, Culpepper noted that he’d normally be in church Sunday morning, but he’d been looking forward to participating in the process as his council district seeks to fill an open seat.
“I have faith in the Lord, and I have faith in the Boston Elections Department,” Culpepper said with a laugh on his way out.
In the mayoral race, Mayor Michelle Wu finished first by an enormous margin, a result that all but secured her second term and ultimately led her main opponent, Josh Kraft, to drop out of the race entirely.
There is little possibility that the recount could change the outcome of the mayor’s race, given how far ahead Wu is of her remaining rivals. Wu drew 66,398 votes to DaRosa’s 2,409, according to unofficial city tallies. (Kraft earned 21,324.)
But there are some stakes to the recount. Under state law, if a candidate withdraws from the general election ballot — as Kraft today has — it is possible to replace him with the next highest vote-getter. But that candidate must have received “a number of votes at least equal to the number of signatures required by law to place his name on the preliminary election ballot.”
DaRosa has so far not cleared that bar. The number of signatures required to get on the preliminary election ballot was 3,000. Given that the unofficial tally has him at 2,409 votes, he would need to gain almost 600 — a quarter of his current mark again — in order to make the ballot.
And because he gathered enough signatures for a recount in just five of the city’s 22 wards, all of those newly-discovered votes would have to come from Wards 4, 8, 9, 16, and 18.
If that remarkable circumstance does not come to pass, Wu would be the only candidate on the ballot in November’s general election.
Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him @cotterreporter.
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