Upstate N.Y. Congressional race still too close to call a month after Election Day
Oh, Utica.
An upstate N.Y. Congressional race remains too close to call a month after Election Day with a judge poring over Post-it notes stuck on disputed ballots and a trove of 55 uncounted votes unearthed just this week.
Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.) trails Republican Claudia Tenney by a razor-thin margin of just 12 votes in the NY-22 district anchored by the city of Utica.
But there are hundreds of still-disputed ballots, far more than enough to sway the race in either direction.
“We have a serious problem on our hands,” Supreme Court Justice Scott J. DelConte said, Syracuse.com reported.
An understatement, at best.
The uncalled vote was already an embarrassment to the Empire State as ballot counts trickled in at a glacial pace from its Oneida county election boards, each of which has different methods for tabulating the unprecedented flood of absentee ballots.
DelConte is overseeing a shambolic initial counting process that included county election officials interpreting their own hand-scrawled notes stuck to disputed ballots.
More than 1,000 ballots are disputed by one candidate or the other and each has a plausible explanation for why they will eventually come out on top.
There’s even a local TV reporter named Josh Rosenblatt who grabbed Twitter notoriety as the guru of the NY-22 count by doggedly following every twist and turn, no matter how small.
Then on Monday, officials in Chenango County, a picturesque Republican-friendly swath of farmland and hills, found 55 ballots cast during the state’s early in-person voting that had somehow gone unnoticed before.
Forty-four of them are valid, a county lawyer said in a letter to DelConte, who will rule on whether they should be counted along with the rest of the contested ballots.
The only other disputed Congressional race is in Iowa, where a state board certified the Republican candidate as the winner by an even slimmer margin of six votes. The Democratic candidate plans to appeal to the House of Representatives to investigate.
The contest’s shakeout comes as House Democrats lick their wounds from a disappointing campaign in which they lost seats despite President-elect Joe Biden’s healthy win over President Trump.
Democrats will remain in control of the House no matter what eventually shakes out with the NY-22 race, But every vote will be precious as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) seeks to steer Biden’s agenda through a closely divided body.
Control of the U.S. Senate is up for grabs in a double-barreled run-off vote in Georgia on January 5, 2021.
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