The Virgin Islands Elections System reported that 15,338 people cast ballots in the 2024 general election on Tuesday. A handful of those voters — and at least two candidates who won their respective races — said the Elections System violated a decades-old law requiring ballot boxes at the polls.
The law, added to the Virgin Islands Code in February 1963, requires that the “Supervisor of Elections shall furnish to each board of elections one ballot box for each polling place in its district, to contain the ballots voted.”
Cleopatra Peter, who won a seat on the Elections Board representing St. Croix after receiving 1,717 votes, said she asked about the availability of ballot boxes last week and was told by election officials that the law is antiquated.
“If the law says that they need to have marbles to count ballots, you have marbles to count votes,” she said. “If it says, hey, you need paper ballots and you need a ballot box, you put the ballot box here for people.”
Elections Supervisor Caroline Fawkes told The Source that the 61-year-old law was superseded by a section added to the V.I. Code in 1984. That law required that the Elections Board, supervisor and Property and Procurement commissioner acquire 110 electronic voting machines “for the purpose of conducting all party primaries, general elections, and referenda, and for receiving, registering, and counting the votes thereof.”
Fawkes said the territory subsequently began using Shouptronic voting machines in 1986 and adopted the current machines in 2014, one year after she came on board. Fawkes noted that she’d never seen a ballot box during her tenure at the Elections System.
“These same people voted on these machines all their lives,” Fawkes said, wondering why the issue was surfacing now. “But you know, when they live their daily lives, they don’t want to go back to the old telephone system. They don’t want to go back to the old things that happened in the past, but they want elections to be stuck in the past — so, that can’t happen.”
Peter, who described herself as a software engineer by trade, said she’s more comfortable with paper and didn’t trust the machines.
“I could write a program to do anything. I don’t trust the algorithm of that machine,” she said, adding that she thought votes needed to be counted where they were cast.
Fawkes said 20 people raised the ballot box issue with the Elections System — six on St. Croix and 14 on St. Thomas. Peter said people were calling her all day and called the situation “chaotic.”
The V.I. Police Department intervened in at least one dispute over ballot boxes on Election Day. According to a statement by Sgt. Kirk Fieulleteau, candidate Mary Moorhead was escorted from the voting center at Claude O. Markoe Elementary School on Tuesday morning.
“She was detained and removed from the premises because she refused to comply with the orders made by the Board of Elections and she refused my lawful order to leave on her own,” Fieulleteau stated on Tuesday, stressing that Moorhead was not arrested.
Moorhead, a St. Croix Independent who won a Board of Education seat with 2,882 votes, did not wish to comment when reached by The Source on Thursday, citing potential involvement with an unspecified legal action. According to reporting by WTJX, Moorhead was later able to cast her ballot at the St. Dunstan’s Episcopal School voting center.
Fawkes Files Amended Complaint in Elections Board Lawsuit
Separately on Thursday, an attorney for Fawkes submitted amended filings in V.I. Superior Court adding Delegate to Congress candidate Ida Smith to a lawsuit Fawkes filed against the Elections Board last month.
In her initial complaint, Fawkes claimed that the board usurped her authority and acted illegally when it overturned her disqualification of Smith’s candidacy based on residency requirements.
Thursday’s amended filings came three days after Fawkes, represented by attorney Brooke Mallory Rutherford of McChain Hamm & Associates, and Christopher Timmons, acting chief of the V.I. Justice Department’s Civil Division and the attorney representing the Elections Board, met in a St. Croix courtroom to argue whether Fawkes had the legal authority to retain private counsel and file a lawsuit in her capacity as supervisor of Elections.
Judge Yvette Ross Edwards, who denied Fawkes’s request for a temporary restraining order on Oct. 31, said during Monday’s hearing that she would issue a written opinion on Fawkes’ capacity in the coming days.
Later, Ross Edwards agreed with Timmons’s assertion that Smith had a significant interest in the outcome of the case and gave Fawkes one week to add the candidate to her lawsuit.
Smith garnered 2,218 out of 13,613 votes — slightly more than 16 percent — in Tuesday’s general election, according to unofficial results released by the V.I. Elections System. Incumbent Stacey Plaskett handily won with 9,988 votes — over 73 percent. Republican candidate Ronald Pickard received 1,311 votes and there were 96 write-ins.
Fawkes told The Source on Thursday that it doesn’t matter that the 2024 general election has come and gone, because she’s seeking clarity in the law.
“It’s never too late to do the right thing,” she said.
