THURSDAY UPDATE:
3 PM: 42 hours after polls have closed, the Columbia County Board of Elections still has not published a consolidated tally of results in either Countywide or Town contests. The Board pulled its three separate Early Vote tallies down from the site, and is promising to have new numbers “later today.”
Reports in both The Register-Star and a direct message from Commissioner Virginia Martin state that “incorrect numbers” were published on Election Night. Why there is continued reluctance to publish a full tally, including Early Votes already counted, remain unclear.
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WEDNESDAY UPDATES:
NOON: The County Election Board has posted a new set of results, but bafflingly these actually show fewer votes than the previous reports. Martin says they will have yet another posting soon.
1:30 PM: Incredibly, the BOE has made things even more confusing, by posting four separate sets of unofficial results: one for machine votes countywide, plus results from early votes in Hudson, early votes in Copake, and early votes in Valatie. There is no central tally which total these overlapping results. Apparently voters and candidates are supposed to cut-and-paste all four sets into a database and try to reconcile them to find out who won or lost...
2 PM: Paul Czajka has now declared victory in the D.A.’s race. A compilation of the confusing BOE data shows him up +3,566 votes over Keeler.
3 PM: The Board of Election has now pulled the three incomplete early voting tallies, and has only the Election Day machine results available on its site.
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On the morning after Election Day in Columbia County, some 30% of votes remain unknown to the public. The messy, developing situation leaves many candidates across the County—not to mention the general public—in suspense as to whether they won or lost.
In some close races, that suspense may continue for another couple of weeks, until the final count of absentee ballots; but many results could be known already, if the disclosure of numbers had proceeded as usual.
Nearly 17,000 votes are known as of 11 am on the day after. But by this site’s estimate—including a mix of hard numbers and educated guesses—the County Board still has some 7,500 votes either uncounted, unreported, or yet to even come in.
No results were made available as of this writing by the Board for Canaan, Clermont and Gallatin; precinct results were also missing in parts of Claverack, Greenport and Germantown.
Countywide, only 78% of precinct results were made available to publications like the Times-Union, WNYT, et al. Based on the locations omitted, this site estimates that another 2,500 or so machine votes will eventually come in.
Normally, votes “on the machine” are read by inspectors as soon as polls closed, telephoned in to the Board, and recorded on a tally sheet for later verification. In past elections, Board staff has posted these results on the wall outside its offices as they come in on Election night for reporters, campaigns and interested citizens to review.
Asked why such disclosures were not made this year, and why machine tallies were made known for some towns but not others, Democratic Commissioner Virginia Martin paused at length before saying “Our process is different this time.”
Martin vowed, however, that more information would be posted at the Board’s website later today.
Meanwhile, spreadsheets provided by the Board prior to Election Day indicate that 3,357 ballots were cast via early voting in three polling places. However, due to a clerical error, some ballots were reportedly printed on the wrong paper, making them unscannable by the electric machines.
Due to this blunder, the ballots had to be impounded, and are now being hand-counted by an unknown process as “emergency ballots.” (Unlike absentee and affidavit ballots, these are not supposed to be able to be challenged; however, it is unclear how the Board will handle any errors or ambiguities arising from how the voters filled them out.)
Martin said that she “did not think” the Board could release any of the early voting results until all of the impounded ballots were hand-counted, though the basis for withholding known results from properly-scanned ballots was unclear.
Lastly, there is an unknown number of absentee ballots which have been received by the Board, and due to provisions for postmarking and military ballots, those results will not be known for at least a couple of weeks. This site guesstimates that some 1,600 absentees may become part of the final results. That number will likely be much lower than previous years due to the advent of early voting.
The upshot for many local contests as well as the high-profile District Attorney’s race is continued uncertainty.
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In the closely-watched District Attorney’s race Czajka current holds a large 2,500-vote lead over Keeler for D.A.
But with only 78% of machine votes known, and none of the early or absentee votes, the race is technically still too close to call. This site estimates that Czajka will continue to do well in the remaining machine counts, with his lead swelling to 3,000.
That said, Democratic participation in early voting has run as high as 3:1 over Republicans and Conservatives, with about 20% of votes coming from those unaffiliated with any political party. As for absentee balloting, those votes tend to mirror Election Day results within a small percentage, but skew more Democratic.
For Keeler to catch up with Czajka, he would need to capture a whopping 80% of those early and absentee votes, which seems like a very tall order. This site expects that these results will fall short for Keeler (at more like 3:2), with Czajka likely to prevail.
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Meanwhile, in Ghent, Town Board candidates Patti Matheney and Koethi Zan have run a very robust campaign which includes a detailed voter ID and get-out-the-vote effort. For these candidates, the suspense is particularly maddening, because the impartial results appear to show them losing or close to tied.
But their data about the outstanding votes strongly indicate that Matheney will easily win, and that Zan has a very strong shot of taking the second Town Board seat.
Many other results either remain totally unknown, or up in the air due to partial reporting. No traditional publication had results for towns like Clermont as of the time of this writing; and many races fall in the way-too-close-to-call category.
The Register-Star has wisely chosen to identify many races as too close to call, such as the Claverack Town Board race, for which results for only 2 of 5 precincts were available. For the Germantown races, some data were available from the Times-Union, but the Register correctly has decided to leave the numbers blank until there are firmer numbers.
In the bizarre Chatham race between Republican Maria Lull (running on the Democratic line) and Democrat Donal Collins (running on the Republican line), which focused on major zoning changes pushed by the Lull camp, public results indicate a race that is too close to call. But private estimates by local politicos suggest that Collins has actually won in a landslide.
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Partial results havre been lopsided enough that a few of them could be confidently called. In Hudson, where November outcomes were essentially decided in the Democratic Primary, Kamal Johnson officially becomes the first African-American mayor in the City’s Hudson. Abdus Miah, who became the first local Bangaladeshi Alderman some 14 years ago, retained his County Supervisor seat. Other races (such as for Alderman in the 2nd and 4th Wards) likewise followed the earlier primary results.
In Stuyvesant, perpetual also-rans Ned Depew and Lee Jamison lost by vast margins for Supervisor and Town Board, respectively.
This site will continue to follow and update results when the Board finally discloses them.