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Sometime on Friday night, while Columbia County residents were washing the dishes after supper or scrolling through Netflix in search of something to watch, the Board of Elections finally posted Election Day and early voting returns.
It had been roughly 72 hours since polls had closed, with no explanation why such numbers were taking so long to be published.
The new numbers significantly alter the picture in several closely-watched towns—and show why many candidates and campaigns were tearing their hair out as the unexplained and highly-unusual delay dragged on all week.
A number of candidates who were previously losing surged into the lead, or into a near-tie. Some of these races have flipped, and others will have to wait for absentees to be counted.
For some reason, the new data does not include countywide results for the District Attrorney’s race, for which Paul Czajka has declared victory over Eugene Keeler; and the numbers of absentee ballots which have been returned is not included. The Board will not begin counting absentees until November 18th.
And unlike other County agencies, the Board’s release of data did not bother to total the votes which candidates received on separate party lines. Ulster County published its results days ago, using color-coding and graphs to make results easily comprehensible.
So if a Democrat also had the Working Families endorsement, and her Republican opponent was also running as a Conservative and Independence Party candidate, it’s up to the public to tally up each candidate’s votes to come up with a total.
This makes it difficult for voters to ascertain who is leading and who is behind. Presumably the Board has this data in a spreadsheet, but no one over the course of the week bothered to correlate it in the usual way.
But at least now there are some data to work with, at last. This site has taken the CCBOE’s raw numbers and put them into a spreadsheet, with the combined results of contested races highlighted in yellow.
DOWNLOAD CORRELATED RESULTS: XLS | PAGES | CSV
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A look at specific results shows why it was so important to get these updates.
For Taghkanic’s Town Board, where Democrat Elizabeth Craig had been just two votes behind Republican Joshua Plass (with Kara Gilmore having locked up the first seat), Craig now leads Plass by 64 votes, with absentees still pending.
In Ghent, where Democrats Patti Matheney and Koethi Zan initially appeared to be far behind Republicans Pete Nelson and Craig Simmons, the race has become extremely close. Matheney is only 3 votes behind Craig in 1st place, and Zan trailing by just 27, with some 120 absentee ballots left to count. (There will be two winners, with Nelson now the least likely of the four to gain a seat.) Ghent Dems believe both Matheney and Zan now have a strong chance of winning.
In Copake, where Democrats Paulette Bonanno and Julie Cohen had been reported to be more than 220 votes behind Republicans Stanley Gansowski and Terry Sullivan, the gap has narrowed to more like 60-70 votes, with an unknown number of absentees outstanding.
In Claverack, where Democrat Katy Cashen had been listed in 3rd place, the new totals now show her in 2nd, ahead of Republican Lisa Bowe but behind George Duntz. Her running mate Ian Solomon remains in 4th.
The Gallatin Town Council race remains very tight, with four candidates within 40 votes of each other now all within 20 votes of each other, again with an unknown number of absentees pending.
The Board did not post an explanation for the extraordinary delay, or why, per one Commissioner’s admission, it had released “incorrect” numbers on the evening of Election Day. Sources indicate that this may have been due to a failure to properly prepare or “zero out” some machines prior to the start of voting, but that is unconfirmed.
