UPDATE ON 35TH DISTRICT RECOUNT – HARMAN VS. HARKEY
Just got off the phone with Neal Kelley, Registrar of Voters. Seems the Harkey folks asked him to recount pretty much everything. A smaller recount may have required only one board (group of recounters) at a cost of $500/day, but a task of this magnitude apparently requires four boards – at a cost of $2000 a day.
Kelley hopes to be done by Tuesday or Wednesday of next week – when we spoke they'd gone through 80% of election-day precincts – but things might not wrap up until Thursday, which would make for seven days of $2K-a-day recount for a grand total of $14,000.
Harkey spent $722,000 of her own money and loaned another $100,000; compared to those numbers, $14K is piddling. But it's also more than I got paid last year.
In a totally unrelated twist, $14,000 is also the national average cost of a tubal ligation reversal. Bless our Associate Art Director Patrice Marsters; when I pointed this out to her, she replied, “That's a whole different type of recount.”
