Galluccio Declared Walsh's Successor

After finding 19 paper ballots that had been accidentally misplaced, the Cambridge Board of Election Commissioners on Saturday declared Anthony D. Galluccio the successor to convicted felon William H. Walsh on the city council.

Galluccio, a 27-year-old legislative side who came in 12th in the 1993 council race, is scheduled to be sworn in as city councillor at a 5:30 p.m. ceremony today at City Hall, Deputy City Clerk John E. Plynn confirmed yesterday.

The special recount was necessitated by Walsh's removal last month from the city council, following his federal sentencing on 41 counts of bank fraud and conspiracy.

The final tally from the recount of Walsh's 1,282 ballots was 881 votes for Galluccio, 780 for James J. McSweency (who came in 10th in the 1993 council race), and 521 "exhausted" ballots, which had neither Galluccio's nor McSweency's name on them.

The election Board certified the recount of Walsh's ballots Saturday night, and the endorsed results were hand-delivered to City Clerk D. Margaret Drury.

The 19 paper ballots had been accidentally placed in current City Coun- cillor Katherine Triantafillou's pile after the November 1993 council election, according to Edward J. Samp Sr., the election board's chair. "No harm is done," Samp said yesterday. "It would not have affected the count in November 1993 at all, but it's embarrassing to us that this happened."

Artis B. Spears, one of the four election commissioners, discovered the missing ballots. "Going through the results of '93, we saw that Walsh had two precincts that gave him 19 ballots," Spears said yesterday. "The person who was next to him was Triantafillou, and we opened up her container."

"When I fanned through her second batch of ballots, there they were," Spears said.

Of the 19 ballots, 13 were distributed to Galluccio, one to McSweeney and five to the pile of "exhausted" ballots.

The discovery of the missing ballots followed an anxiety-filled weekend, with former council candidates saying a miscount might invalidate the results of the whole election. But Samp said the ballots had been misplaced after being tallied, not before.

"Triantafillou wasn't given credit for any ballot other than she deserves," Samp said. "It made absolutely no difference in her official count because the ballots had already been counted."

Election officials said misplacing the ballots was only an accident. "There is no evidence of an impropriety," Teresa S. Neighbor, the board's executive director, said Saturday.

"The worker, instead of putting the ballots to the left, put them to the right, or vice versa," Spears said.

Samp said the error was not detected before because no recount of the ballots had taken place between the 1993 election and last week.

A similar misplacement of ballots actually occurred during a Cambridge school committee election in the 1980s, according to Spears.

But though the discovery of the missing ballots clears up one issue, the city's complicated voting system, called proportional representation, remains in dispute. McSweeney, who came in 10th in the council race and trailed Walsh by only 47 votes in the election, will appear this afternoon before the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), the state's highest judicial body, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Galluccio from being sworn in.

Under proportional representation, voters do not choose only one candidate. Rather, they order the candidates by numerical preference. Candidates must reach a certain quota of votes to win. Ballots of losing candidates, starting from the bottom, are redistributed until nine winners are produced.

When a seat is vacated, the departing councillor's ballots--those ballots that marked him or her first preference, and ballots transferred from losing candidates--are redistributed. This last happened in 1985, when Mayor Leonard Russell died in office.

Since 1941, Cambridge has used proportional representation to elect the nine city council and six school committee positions. It is the only city in the United States to use proportional representation for both bodies.

McSweeney said he was the favorite of most Walsh voters. The 31-year-old employee-benefits specialist has failed twice in getting the courts to declare him the winner or to order a recounting of all the ballots from the election, not just Walsh's.

"We have asked two things all along that Mr. McSweeney be appointed as the 10th-place winner, or that the unallocated, 'exhausted' ballots, not just Mr. Walsh's, be counted," said Dennis J. Newman '72, McSweeney's attorney. "If Walsh had never run and if you re-plugged his votes back into the election system, I'd be in the council and Mr. Galluccio wouldn't," McSweeney said yesterday. "Or re-run the election as if Walsh wasn't there, I would have won easily."

"I was defeated by a flawed system, and [Galluccio] happened to benefit by it," McSweeney added. "It's not representative of the people."

McSweeney will appear before Associate Justice Herbert P. Wilkins '51 in a hearing today to prevent the oath of office from being administered, Newman said. Galluccio, aide to state Sen. Robert D. Wetmore (D-Barre) and a night student at Suffolk University Law School, said he was hopeful McSweeney's court challenge would fail. "I hope the [SJC] will hold the lower courts' decisions and that the [swearing-in] will go forward as planned," he said in an interview yesterday

Artis B. Spears, one of the four election commissioners, discovered the missing ballots. "Going through the results of '93, we saw that Walsh had two precincts that gave him 19 ballots," Spears said yesterday. "The person who was next to him was Triantafillou, and we opened up her container."

"When I fanned through her second batch of ballots, there they were," Spears said.

Of the 19 ballots, 13 were distributed to Galluccio, one to McSweeney and five to the pile of "exhausted" ballots.

The discovery of the missing ballots followed an anxiety-filled weekend, with former council candidates saying a miscount might invalidate the results of the whole election. But Samp said the ballots had been misplaced after being tallied, not before.

"Triantafillou wasn't given credit for any ballot other than she deserves," Samp said. "It made absolutely no difference in her official count because the ballots had already been counted."

Election officials said misplacing the ballots was only an accident. "There is no evidence of an impropriety," Teresa S. Neighbor, the board's executive director, said Saturday.

"The worker, instead of putting the ballots to the left, put them to the right, or vice versa," Spears said.

Samp said the error was not detected before because no recount of the ballots had taken place between the 1993 election and last week.

A similar misplacement of ballots actually occurred during a Cambridge school committee election in the 1980s, according to Spears.

But though the discovery of the missing ballots clears up one issue, the city's complicated voting system, called proportional representation, remains in dispute. McSweeney, who came in 10th in the council race and trailed Walsh by only 47 votes in the election, will appear this afternoon before the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC), the state's highest judicial body, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Galluccio from being sworn in.

Under proportional representation, voters do not choose only one candidate. Rather, they order the candidates by numerical preference. Candidates must reach a certain quota of votes to win. Ballots of losing candidates, starting from the bottom, are redistributed until nine winners are produced.

When a seat is vacated, the departing councillor's ballots--those ballots that marked him or her first preference, and ballots transferred from losing candidates--are redistributed. This last happened in 1985, when Mayor Leonard Russell died in office.

Since 1941, Cambridge has used proportional representation to elect the nine city council and six school committee positions. It is the only city in the United States to use proportional representation for both bodies.

McSweeney said he was the favorite of most Walsh voters. The 31-year-old employee-benefits specialist has failed twice in getting the courts to declare him the winner or to order a recounting of all the ballots from the election, not just Walsh's.

"We have asked two things all along that Mr. McSweeney be appointed as the 10th-place winner, or that the unallocated, 'exhausted' ballots, not just Mr. Walsh's, be counted," said Dennis J. Newman '72, McSweeney's attorney. "If Walsh had never run and if you re-plugged his votes back into the election system, I'd be in the council and Mr. Galluccio wouldn't," McSweeney said yesterday. "Or re-run the election as if Walsh wasn't there, I would have won easily."

"I was defeated by a flawed system, and [Galluccio] happened to benefit by it," McSweeney added. "It's not representative of the people."

McSweeney will appear before Associate Justice Herbert P. Wilkins '51 in a hearing today to prevent the oath of office from being administered, Newman said. Galluccio, aide to state Sen. Robert D. Wetmore (D-Barre) and a night student at Suffolk University Law School, said he was hopeful McSweeney's court challenge would fail. "I hope the [SJC] will hold the lower courts' decisions and that the [swearing-in] will go forward as planned," he said in an interview yesterday