Gilmanton endures election night without power, Internet

Gilmanton Town Clerk/Tax Collector Debra A. Cornett (left) and Kathy Brooks manually count votes by lamp light during the March 14 town election, when a nor'easter knocked out power and Internet. (Courtesy photo)

By DAVID CARKHUFF/THE LACONIA DAILY SUN

GILMANTON — Tricky driving and whiteout conditions during Tuesday's nor'easter weren't the only challenges facing town election officials, and impacts from the storm carried over into Thursday's business operations at Town Hall.

A sign on the door Thursday read, "Systems are down due to the storm. We cannot process at this time. Sorry!"

The Internet remained down so the clerk's office staff could not process motor vehicle registrations or other state agency business.

A section of Route 140 between Gilmanton and Belmont also remained closed Thursday afternoon because of lines and trees down.

"We had a big mess. It was very interesting. But I was very impressed with our turnout," said Gilmanton Town Clerk/Tax Collector Debra A. Cornett.

Out of 2,679 eligible voters, 859 voted, Cornett reported. Thirty-two percent turnout marked one of the highest reported in the area.

"We're rugged here," Cornett said.

Gilmanton was one of several towns to opt to continue with voting on Tuesday, despite forecasts of the record-setting March blizzard bearing down on New England. Partly due to confusion at the state level over whether local officials could reschedule Town Meeting voting, many towns balked at changing the date.

Everything started without too many snags on Tuesday. The town of Gilmanton, like others in the county, had tested its ballot-counting machine, the AccuVote scanner, earlier on March 7.

The Secretary of State's Office issued the AccuVote machine to the town years ago. Cornett explained that because Gilmanton maintained only one voting place, and did not have wards, the state allocated only one machine.

Trouble started midway into the blizzard. The power went out about 4 p.m. on Voting Day, Tuesday.

Ballot inspector Brenda Currier went home and gathered up all of her oil lamps and brought them back so the elections staff could have some light to count absentee ballots.

But the outage had already inflicted its damage. "Because it was a brownout, it fried our machine and our card," Cornett said. "I had my old wooden ballot box, so anybody that was putting in ballots, we had to put them in and lock them into the wooden ballot box and secure that for the night."

Someone reported seeing the lights come back on at Town Hall around midnight Tuesday, but the power outage had delayed ballot counting.

LHS Associates, a Salem-based company that maintains a supply of AccuVote machines in the region, arrived the next morning with a replacement ballot scanner.

"Luckily I had purchased a spare card that was ready to go, so we were able to use that and we had to reprocess every one of the ballots," Cornett said.

"We had to go through the whole process," she said. Ballots were rescanned. Then, officials had to confirm the number of voters. By 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, officials finally found the one voter who had eluded them in the count, and the results were posted. By 5 p.m. Thursday, the town was reporting that Eversource crews had restored power in the area. Metrocast was still working to restore Internet service on Thursday afternoon, according to the town website, http://www.gilmantonnh.org.