Runner-Up Challenges Union Election

The runner-up in the recent teachers union election is asking for the results to be thrown out and for a revote to be called, after he pointed out irregularities with the mail-in ballots and advantages for the incumbent.

Tom Burns, the union’s former vice president, lodged a formal complaint with the New Haven Federation of Teachers and the U.S. Department of Labor earlier this year. He’s challenging the results of the December election when Dave Cicarella, the incumbent since 2006, narrowly won reelection.

In his complaint, Burns said that the firm running the elections didn’t keep all the ballots in the locked post-office box and didn’t accept any ballots that took too long to arrive. He also said that Cicarella had unfairly used the perks of his role to publicize his platform in the union newsletter.

Burns said that the big issues facing the public-school system necessitated a revote.

“What we’re hoping is that they’ll overturn it and maybe run it a little differently. Everyone can run on the same ticket, the ballot will be the same, and no new people can get in — just re-run it so that every ballot counts,” Burns said. ​“It’s too important of a time in our city. A lot of people are leaving, and there’s a lot of change. It’s such an important election for my supporters and [Cicarella’s] supporters to get the right result.”

Cicarella dismissed the complaint’s allegations as a ​“distraction.”

“I am equal parts disappointed, frustrated and angry. What [Burns is] doing is merely a distraction,” Cicarella said. ​“My personal relationship with him is something I have to deal with, but as a union, the work is too important to not move move forward. The election is behind us.”

On Tuesday afternoon, the five former trustees of the New Haven Federation of Teachers (who are in charge of presiding over elections) plan to tell the union’s 26-member executive board that they investigated the complaint and found no reason to hold a revote. One trustee had run on Burns’s slate.

Burns will now be making his case to the national American Federation of Teachers, then on to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards.

The three-way race for the presidency largely centered on how the union should position itself in negotiations with the new superintendent.

Should it collaborate, as Cicarella argued it had succeeded in doing since creating school reform? Or should it confront, as a budget deficit threatened layoffs and school closures?

After the ballots were tabulated, Cicarella pulled out a slim victory, earning 44 percent of the vote. Burns trailed him at 42 percent.

Burns said that he’d initially planned on letting the results stand. ​“The people made their choice,” he told reporters. ​“My voice will be silent, from this day forward.” But he said that his supporters convinced him to file an appeal. He said the election had been too tight to drop it.

“Five hundred people voted against [Cicarella], if you add our votes together,” Burns said. ​“That’s one of the reasons I filed a complaint. The fact that with 19 votes, it could have been different. It’s too close not to make sure everybody’s vote is counted.”

Post Office Problems

Expecting high turnout, the union hired a local firm, MK Election Services, to run an independent election with mail-in ballots. Burns took issue with how the firm stored ballots and rejected votes that weren’t received by the deadline.

Last fall, teachers received ballots at their home address, with instructions for mailing the envelopes back so that they’d be inside a post-office box by Dec. 4.

But along the way, mail-sorters accidentally placed the ballots into the wrong slot for another race that MK Elections was running.

To prevent any tampering, MK Elections had promised that it wouldn’t open the post-office box until election night. It kept its word on that, and it asked postal workers to put the misplaced ballots back into the right box. But the workers said they couldn’t accept any mail back that they’d already passed over the counter.

MK Elections alerted both Cicarella and Burns about the issue, sending a picture of the way it had sealed ballots at an employee’s home.

Burns said that this flap was a ​“major concern” to him because several teachers had told him their votes weren’t counted.

“The lack of security concerning ballots in this election was unprecedented,” Burns wrote in the complaint. ​“When counting the ballots in our election, it was observed that a ballot from the other election was still in our batch. How many ballots from our election may have still been in their batch?”

Cicarella said that he trusted MK Elections hadn’t tampered with the ballots.

“That’s why we used an outside firm. We don’t want teachers even touching those ballots,” Cicarella said. ​“He secured those and put them off-site. Frankly, if he wanted to cheat, he could go there any time he wants. MK Elections is a professional firm, bonded and insured. If they ever do anything inappropriate, they’d never work again.”

Burns also claimed that close to 50 votes might not have been counted. Eleven teachers asked for a duplicate ballot but then never cast a vote, and forty-three ballots were postmarked before the election but didn’t make it in time to be counted.

Burns said that he was ​“well aware” of the deadline, but he argued in the complaint, that ​“with all the other irregularities in an election of such importance and where the margin of victory in many races was minuscule,” those votes made the validity dubious.

Incumbency Advantage

Burns also took issue with the way that Cicarella used the union newsletter, saying a front-page editorial looked more like a stump speech.

In the issue of ​“The Advance” that went out before the election, Cicarella wrote an op-ed entitled, ​“Collaboration: There’s Plenty of Fight in It,” alongside a picture of himself and several delegates who attended the American Federation of Teachers National Convention over the summer.

Cicarella said that he’d been writing articles like that since 2009, when collaboration became one of the pillars of school reform.

But Burns said that violated union rules and federal law because other candidates didn’t have a similar platform.

“This was not an opportunity afforded to myself or the other candidate for president, Cameo Thorne,” Burns wrote in the complaint. ​“This article is not allowed by federal law as the other candidates were not afforded this opportunity and must be treated equally.”

Throughout the campaign, Thorne had asked the union to provide a way for lesser-known candidates to make their positions known to the membership. She said that she’s still committed to advocating for those changes to be written into the union’s bylaws for the next election.

“There are members who came up to me after and said they found it very difficult to get information. Some people didn’t know I was running until after the election,” Thorne said. ​“That shouldn’t happen. I want to be fair with everyone, but I definitely feel very strongly about the democratic process being honored.”