U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand can rest easy, at least for now: Her absentee ballot in the NY-20 special election, which had been challenged by the campaign of GOP candidate Jim Tedisco, has been counted, and is included in the current vote totals that put Democrat Scott Murphy ahead by 264 votes.
However, this is not quite the end of the story, and the potential remains for it to be un-counted later on, though it doesn’t seem likely that such a thing would actually happen.
Tedisco’s campaign alleged on Tuesday that Gillibrand was ineligible to vote absentee because she was in her home county on Election Day. Gillibrand denies that she was there when the polls were open — that she only arrived after the polls had closed. And it’s also worth noting that the current governing case law in New York says that the ballot would still be counted.
Columbia County Democratic election commissioner Virginia Martin explained to me that at the time the Tedisco camp challenged Gillibrand’s envelope, both she and the Republican deputy commissioner had overruled the challenge. The ballot was set aside anyway, however, pending litigation.
What happened next was that Judge James V. Brands issued a ruling that gave the go-ahead to count all such ballots that were approved by both local officials but where a campaign was still objecting. However, Brands also applied a procedure to make copies of those ballots, which are then placed inside the envelopes and kept sealed, so that any batch of absentee envelopes that are successfully challenged at a later date can potentially be subtracted.
“Theoretically it could be reviewed later,” said Martin, “because it is a copy of her vote in an envelope that we’ve resealed with tape.”
I asked Martin whether Gillibrand’s ballot was safe at this point — that realistically it’s not likely to be un-counted. “Yeah,” she replied, “I think you’re correct in saying that.”
