Fractions divide a town
The exact count of the vote — 136 to 70 —had town officials hitting their calculators yesterday. The zoning measure needed a two-thirds vote to pass. A calculation by town accountant Trudy Brazil indicated that 136 votes are two-thirds of 206 total votes, said Town Clerk Cynthia Slade.
Brazil said she used the calculation of .66 multiplied by 206 to obtain the number.
But using .6666 — a more accurate version of two-thirds — the affirmative vote needed to be 137 instead of 136, according to an anonymous caller to town hall and to the Times.
Slade said that she called several of her colleagues to see how they calculate a two-thirds vote, and the answer varied widely. In Provincetown, Town Clerk Doug Johnstone uses .66. But Johnstone said he’d never had a close vote where it might matter.
A spokesman from the Secretary of State’s office was not available to comment yesterday.
so reported the Cape Cod Times on April 30, 2009.