Recount confirms Wilkerson victory in Boston Senate race
City election workers, after a tense day painstakingly reviewing more than 25,000 ballots under the scrutiny of campaign volunteers and lawyers, declared Dianne Wilkerson the official Democratic nominee in the Second Suffolk Senate race.
Wilkerson was expressionless as the assistant register of votes, John Donovan, announced at 9 p.m. that a recount had widened the incumbent's lead.
``I hope now we can move on," she said.
The final tally had Wilkerson with 6,478 votes to 5,711 for her challenger, Sonia Chang-Diaz. It was a more decisive win than had been originally counted on election night, when Wilkerson le d by 141 votes. Wilkerson now faces Republican Samiyah Diaz in the general election.
As the totals were read yesterday, Chang-Diaz approached Wilkerson, shook her hand, and uttered congratulations. An aide distributed prepared concession statements.
``From the beginning, this was about the principles of good governance," she said later. ``No matter what the outcome, I feel every voter won something today."
The recount began yesterday morning after election officials brought in metal boxes that contained ballots from last week's primary election. With crowds of supporters in the room observing every move, election workers shuffled through ballots at 15 counting tables in a scene that soon resembled the tense 2000 presidential recounts in Florida.
The recount bogged down early, with lawyers for each candidate circling the room and bringing up frequent objections and deliberations over questionable ballots.
A lengthy protest kept one table at a standstill for nearly an hour because a voter had written ``State Senator Dianne Wilkerson" in black ink, but it was in the wrong spot on the ballot.
Another table stopped because a voter had written in ``Diaz (Dem)." Election workers and campaign representatives deliberated about whether the voter intended to vote for Chang-Diaz, a Democrat, or Samiyah Diaz, a South End Republican who will face the Democratic nominee in the general election. The ballot was ultimately thrown out.
The recount closes a chapter in what became a long election saga. Initially, Wilkerson found herself in the fight for her political life when she failed earlier in the year to get the 300 signatures needed to get her name on the ballot in the Democratic primary and Chang-Diaz entered the race.
Wilkerson's oversight forced a write-in campaign in which voters had to write the name and address of their choice or affix a sticker bearing the same information and then mark an oval next to the name.
Both candidates said there were problems with the way the city handled the voting.
The morning after the Sept. 19 primary, Chang-Diaz trailed Wilkerson by 141 votes when officials discovered more than 2,700 ballots that had been overlooked by election workers. A four-hour public count Sept. 21 at City Hall extended Wilkerson's victory to 692 votes, or 5 percent of the 12,933 votes cast in the state Senate race.
Many political observers -- along with Chang-Diaz -- said the gap was probably too wide to close, but the 28-year-old former school teacher refused to concede the race. She said she wanted to expose problems in a write-in campaign that confused many voters and caused headaches at polling places. Her campaign gathered enough signatures to force a recount in eight of the 10 wards.
A judge ruled Thursday that the city had to recount all wards in the district because this case was ``a terribly unusual situation" and an issue of ``public confidence in the accuracy of the election."
``No matter what the outcome, this is a good day," Chang-Diaz said earlier in the day. ``It's a good day for the City of Boston."
Indeed, throughout the process, Chang-Diaz, focused less on her loss and turned the recount instead into an indictment on the city's election procedures.
Some speculated that could help raise her profile and lay the groundwork for another political campaign.
The district's 10 wards include Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill, Chinatown, Fenway, Roxbury, the South End, and parts of the Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Dorchester, and Mattapan.
Matt Viser can be reached at maviser@globe.com. 