Yesterday we learned that the race in NY-22 had narrowed from 19 votes earlier this week down to 3 to 5 votes. After more counting throughout the day yesterday, Democrat Anthony Brindisi has taken the lead.
Brindisi (D) has a 14-vote lead over challenger Claudia Tenney (R) after several hundred affidavit ballots from Oneida County were finally tabulated this week. The new counts from Oneida County put Brindisi at 155,625 votes to Tenney’s 155,611, which amounts to a 0.004% lead for Brindisi.
…a Tenney campaign spokesman said the disputed Oneida County votes came from Utica and Rome, two urban areas he said would favor Brindisi.
In addition to counting more contested ballots in Oneida County, the judge spent much of Wednesday deciding whether or not to count 118 contested absentee ballots from Madison County. Tenney’s attorneys wanted those ballots tossed because they were all stamped Nov. 4th, the judge interviewed everyone working at the post office that day, all of whom denied the ballots came in late:
Tenney’s attorneys asked a Republican election commissioner, Mary Egger, to testify virtually, and she said she couldn’t say definitively whether the ballots arrived after Nov. 3, because six people worked in the office on Nov. 4 and any one of them could have received the late ballots and then timestamped them.
DelConte asked Egger to name the employees. He asked if they could be available to testify. And then he put them on the stand…
The six employees gave various versions of “no” when asked whether they had received any late ballots, and their answers seemed to satisfy DelConte.
No one besides the judge seems to know what the split was among those 118 ballots but the absentee ballots tended to favor Brindisi.
The count still isn’t done yet. Election officials in Oneida County will continue going through the remaining ballots next week, however Judge DelConte’s court is closed and won’t reopen until January 4. So there’s no chance this will be decided in time for the start of the new Congress. Once the judge does return to work, he’ll still have to decide which ballots become part of the official count but at this point it certainly looks as if he’s planning to include everything he’s seen so far.
The race is still tight enough that the lead could change again but we’re running out of ballots to count at this point.
