I have just obtained the latest vote numbers in the NY-20 race from Saratoga County, where the campaign of GOP candidate Jim Tedisco claimed on Friday that an unreported discovery of new votes was giving him a pickup of 228, and putting him ahead overall by 30 raw votes. Whether or not that was true at the time, it turns out that as of 10:30 a.m. this morning it’s actually the opposite, with Democrat Scott Murphy picking up votes in this county for now.
The numbers provided by a county election commissioner show Murphy picking up a net 97 votes when compared to the state’s most recent figures from Friday, as the precincts go through the standard process of proofreading their spreadsheets against the random human errors that occurred on Election Night. These errors tend to be very small and break about evenly, but in a race this close they have suddenly become consequential.
The state could update their numbers for all the counties later this afternoon, so it’s worth remembering a piece of wisdom I learned during my six years living in Wisconsin: If you don’t like the weather, wait 15 minutes. For all we know, those Saratoga numbers might have significantly changed yet again, or a different county could have a bunch of newly-revealed votes for either Tedisco or Murphy.
