Nearly 67 hours since polls closed, candidates and their supporters continue to wait for the Columbia County Board of Elections to release comprehensive results of Tuesday’s local elections. Some are starting to get understandably antsy, and wondering what the hold-up could possibly be.
“This truly could not be more unfair to the candidates and the process,” wrote one candidate early on Friday. That town’s race has already had all its early votes either tabulated by the machines, or hand-counted, but has not seen those numbers released.
On Thursday, the Board’s site promised full results by the end of the day; that deadline was not met. The same promise appears again today, on Friday, but as of 3:30 pm no new data have been released.
“Not posting accurate results is causing so much confusion and yes, the conspiracy theories are swirling,” that candidate also wrote early on Friday. “This has to be addressed and corrected today. “In our case, we are certain the [Board’s partial] numbers are incorrect, as we were there for the count of the emergency ballots,” the candidate wrote.
Some County officials are also starting to chime in.
“[It] would be good to get the early votes and Election Day votes combined ASAP and presented so we are just waiting for absentees,” one Columbia County supervisor wrote to a Commissioner on Thursday, adding that doing so “would establish some credibility.” More than a day later, the Board still has not done so.
Campaigns reportedly continue “to receive numerous condolence emails and phone calls” in places where the machine-only results make it look as if their candidates are behind, though the early vote tallies will show them pulling even or behind. Participation data indicates that early voters were overwhelmingly members of the Democratic Party.
To date, the Board has published then retracted votes cast “on the machine,” then re-published new numbers. Democratic Commissioner Virginia Martin has acknowledged that those initial numbers were “incorrect.” Sources indicate that a reason for this initial error may have been that some voting machines were not properly “zeroed out” before polling began, meaning the Board had to do a more forensic examination to verify those results.
Meanwhile, the more than 3,300 early votes cast in Columbia County remain embargoed for unknown reasons, perhaps related to another SNAFU involving ballots printed on the wrong stock.
The Board briefly published some partial early voting results, separated from the main tallies, and broken down by polling place—then took these files down from its website. That reversal appears to have been due to a concern that the detailed breakdown could potentially exposed how people voted, in races where only one person from a Town participated in early voting at that polling place.
However, that risk could have been easily eliminated had the Board combined all three polling places’ results and rolled them into the main results, as other counties have.
Apparently, at least two towns had all of their votes tallied on Tuesday night, including ballots which could not be scanned and required hand-counts, leaving only absentees to be reviewed on the 18th. An estimated 500-600 other “emergency” early ballots had been expected to be hand-counted by now, but appear to remain either untallied or simply unreleased, again for reasons unknown.
Another source says that State officials are now in close communication with BOE officials in an effort to resolve and expedite whatever the mystery hold-ups may be.
However, since Monday is Veterans Day—a Federal holiday—if numbers are not published by close of business today, it seems unlikely that there will be any full results and clarifications until next Tuesday. That would make the delay of full machine and early voting results last an entire week after Election Day.
While defenders of the CCBOE have blamed “new procedures” related to early voting for the delay, other nearby counties such as Dutchess, Albany, Ulster and Greene produced their combined results in combined, easy-to-understand tables days ago.
