Thursday, 4:30 PM
Election observer appointed for Boston
By Donovan Slack, GLOBE STAFF
Secretary of State William F. Galvin has appointed an election observer with authority to override Boston election officials in a special City Council election Tuesday, the first since a series of mishaps marred city elections last fall.
Peter J. Koutoujian, a former election observer for the US State Department who worked in Kosovo and Armenia, will be stationed in Boston City Hall as voters in South Boston, Chinatown, and the South End head to the polls to narrow the field of candidates for the Council’s District 2 seat.
Boston election officials said they expected Galvin would also post at least one monitor in each of the 27 precincts involved in Tuesday’s election.
It is the strongest role taken by Galvin in city elections, which have come under scrutiny for a laundry list of problems in recent years. Last year, after a chaotic November election in which 38 Boston precincts ran out of ballots, city election officials agreed to submit to state oversight through 2008. As part of the agreement, the city acknowledged it had violated state election laws, failed to provide poll workers enough training to deal with the shortages, and maintain adequate communication between the polls and City Hall.
In that election, investigators found that polling places had begun notifying City Hall that they were running low on ballots in midafternoon, but that bungled communications contributed to long delays in supplying new ones. Two months earlier, in a key preliminary election, Boston election workers failed to count thousands of write-in ballots in a state Senate primary, leading to a public counting several days later.
Koutoujian has been given the authority in Tuesday’s election to overrule decisions by city election officials and to correct problems as they occur, Koutoujian said.
He planned to monitor calls to the Election Department throughout the day and to watch as votes are tabulated Tuesday night.
"We hope it will be a very smooth election," he said.
