When a seat is vacated, the board does not count all ballots from the election. Thus, only the 2182 ballots that listed Walsh as first choice, and ballots transferred to him from losing candidates, were counted.

McSweeney, who at one point in the 1993 election trailed Walsh by only 47 votes, said he is the candidate most preferred by Walsh's voters--if only Walsh's ballots are counted. Only the redistribution of the other votes that went to Walsh gave the victory to Galluccio, McSweeney said.

He insisted that a fair election must include all ballots cast in the original election.

"The only way to correctly do this is start from the beginning, assume that Bill Walsh was never in the election, take his ballots and re-run the whole election," said the 31-year-old employee-benefits specialist.

McSweeney said 2284 of his original votes had ended up in the "exhausted" pile and were ineligible for recount. He charged that the city's voting system unfairly ignored those voters.

"This is a matter of principle," he said. "You do not eliminate 2284 votes from a recount. Everybody's vote has to count."

"If all nine city councillors quit today and resigned, the chance of me being elected are slim," he added. "The majority of my votes are in the exhausted pile."

Newman agreed. "The most fair way from my standpoint is that the tenth person should be appointed," he said in an interview last night. "Another fair way would be to count all the ballots over again."

Edward N. Cyr, who served on the city council from 1990 to 1992 and came in 11th in the last election, said the missing ballots could invalidate the entire election.

"It's a significant problem," he said in an interview last night. "It could mean they have to unravel the whole election. It could mean that those 19 votes either existed with those 19 votes either existed with Walsh at one point or they made a mistake and never had them."

"If I had had the 19 votes, for example, it would have changed the whole election," Cyr added.

Cyr trailed current City Councillor Kathleen L. Born by only 11 votes at one point in the original election.

But George A. Spartichino, a fence contractor who came in third in the recount before being eliminated, blamed McSweeney for refusing to accept defeat.

"I guess if you're at the down end of anything you're unhappy with it," he said last night. "Have you ever seen a happy loser?"

But Cyr said proportional representation has led to polarization in city politics. Voters are forced to choose extremist candidates in the hopes that their political platforms will be preserved if votes are transferred, Cyr said.

"Historically, we've had a very divided council, and in large part because of the system of proportional representation," he said. "We haven't chosen people good in consensus-building but people who choose one side or another."

"The thing to understand about proportional representation," Cyr said, "is that unlike every other voting system where it is black and white, where randomness and the like play no role, in this system they do."

Cambridge is the only city in the United States to use proportional representation for both city council and school committee elections