Suffolk's Board of Elections is auditing the county voting machines in NY's 1st Congressional District against a hand-count of ballots since the discovery of a "human error" that resulted in misreporting the vote totals for the Tim Bishop-Randy Alschuler race.
The night of the election, the Associated Press (AP) called the result in favor of incumbent Democrat Bishop.
Then it turned out, not only was Bishop no longer in the lead by some reported 4000 votes, but was in fact behind Altschuler: the two separated by less than 400 votes. And this doesn't take into consideration the absentee ballots that have yet to be counted.
AP has since withdrawn their call.
Officials are now hand-counting the ballots from the fifth of 43 voting machines they will audit, according to Newsday. They will continue all day on Veteran's Day and it is estimated it could take more than eight days to hand-count all ballots.
The audit should determine if the counts recorded by the machines match a count of the actual paper ballots. Election official seem confident that there will be no discrepancy with the machines; that the error might have been due to misreported totals by CD1 poll workers, who were confused by the tapes generated by the new machines.
As we reported on Monday, Tim Bishop is seeking a judge-supervised recount. At this time, Altschuler's camp remains silent about a court-ordered count.
There are a few other New York races that have not yet been determined:
- Also on Long Island, incumbent Senator Craig Johnson (D-Port Washington) is trailing Republican challenger Jack Martins.
- Upstate, Republican Mark Grisanti from Buffalo, leads incumbent Democrat Senator Antoine Thompson
Both of these races remain virtually deadlocked, and depending on the outcome could affect the balance of power in State Senate.
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Comments
There are a few inaccuracies in your report. First you say, "Suffolk's Board of Elections is auditing the county voting machines in NY's 1st Congressional District since the discovery of a "human error" that resulted in misreporting the vote totals for the Tim Bishop-Randy Alschuler race." The audit would have been conducted regardless of any races being in despute. This step is to verify the machines were working correctly, regardless of the impact on any race.
While there is counting by hand being done in the audit, it is different from a hand count being sought by the Bishop team. In the audit it is being done from the perspective of the machines operating properly (e.g. circle filled in equals affirmative vote). In a hand recount such as the Bishop team is requesting each ballot must be examined from the perspective of the "intent of the voter", such that a properly filled in dot with a big "X" through it might count as a vote by the machine, but the intent of the voter is in question. Similarly, a nice round dot, next to but not in a circle, might not be recognized by the machine, but might indicate the intent of the voter that it should be counted as if it was.
Thank you for your comment. I amended my first sentence to reflect that the machines were being audited against a full hand-count.
"Suffolk's Board of Elections is auditing the county voting machines in NY's 1st Congressional District against a hand-count of ballots since the discovery of a "human error" that resulted in misreporting the vote totals for the Tim Bishop-Randy Alschuler race."
The article does acknowledge that the recount Bishop seeks is court-supervised vs. the current hand-count, just no details about voter intent until the case further develops.
I appreciate your comments and thank you for reading!
I just love how liberal loser Bishop is trying to go directly to a hand recount rather than waiting for the board of elections to do its job and follow procedure. Can you think of a better way for a trunk full of "missing" ballots to mysteriously show up and win it for Dim Bishop.
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