UFT Election Report: What I learned - Don't Eat the Cauliflower

Lots of infighting at the ballot count. Claims of paper thickness and other stuff is causing paper jams.--- 3:15 PM, April 18 - message from UFT vote count

The UFT should ask the American Arbitration Association for a rebate. I'm actually glad my wife had me on Passover readiness duty all day today in prep for our 27 guest tomorrow night so I wasn't able to give in to any temptations to go back after a wasted day yesterday -- though I did ask Amy Arundell to  write me a pass just in case I got the itch- she rightly said NO. Let me recount what happened yesterday.

The AAA serves dinner

April 17 - Dinner was served at around 7PM at the American Arbitration Association a few blocks from the UFT after a day of mostly wasteful vote counting. I wouldn't leave until I had this "wonderful dinner" but I finally gave up the ghost at around 8PM with literally no results. With every election cycle the process gets worse. And rumors are the UFT gives the AAA around a half a million bucks to run the election. I think even some of the top officials who were there with us to witness the fiasco might begin to rethink how UFT elections are run, though I wonder why they even bother anymore. I would give the half a million to a fund for an ATR bye out . As James points out, no one would notice anyway -- ICEUFT Blog: UFT ELECTION MERCIFULLY ENDS. 

Here is where the situation stood when I left at 8PM Wednesday when they were still tabulating the functional votes which were in the range of 10,000 and they were up to about 8,000 when I left. They expected to have slate results by 11 PM or later but based on the speed I didn't see how. There were still about 10,000 elem votes (based on how many in 2016, 4500 high school and 2500 middle school. They expected to begin again at 8AM this morning.

I got to the AAA, located in the basement of 120 Broadway at around 12 PM. In the room observing were Mike and Mark from New Action, Erik from Solidarity (Lydia came to relieve him later), Myrie from MORE, an alternating crew of Leroy/Dave Hickey/Howie from Unity, Amy as chair of the election committee, Yasmin who was in charge of the election process

Only about 10,000 retiree votes were counted using two scanners that seemed to come to a stop every minute. We were able to watch the ballots as they were scanned on a big screen. The process was so slow I left and went uptown to pick up some library books, drop them off at my apartment and since I didn't  have an ed notes leaflet prepared for the Delegate Assembly, I took my stash of the April edition of the Indypendent, which I distribute for them down to hand out at the DA. But it was 2:30 and I went back to the vote count and it was still crawling along with the retiree vote which at this point was around 18-20,000 with more to go. 

Then they did the functional which went by like molasses.
From what I saw on the big screen, Unity looked like it was winning the retiree vote by at least 10-1, with New Action pulling some votes and Solidarity too - MORE pulled very little from what I saw in the retirees.

In functional, Unity again was also winning very big -- maybe a little less than 10-1. MORE pulled some more votes here and so did Solidarity while New Action did very little.

At this point I left and finally wrote this up tonight -- and in the midst some real results came in -- reports later in a follow-up.

Mark and Mike from New Action