And the latest official numbers in NY-20 are…pretty much the same as yesterday, with Republican candidate Jim Tedisco leading by 17 votes. But really, at this point that number is obsolete, as absentee ballots are being counted and not yet reported — we don’t know what’s going on.
Only one change has been officially registered since yesterday, with both Tedisco and Democratic candidate Scott Murphy gaining one vote each in Essex County, not affecting the margin. Only one county is left that hasn’t sent recanvassed machine totals to the state, Greene County. And as a State Elections Board spokesman explained to us, we won’t know exactly what the recanvass there will produce because Greene is recanvassing while simultaneously counting their absentee ballots, thus jumbling those numbers together when they do arrive.
And here’s where it gets complicated. The Murphy campaign just put out a press release declaring that Delaware County has completely counted their absentees, the first county to do so, and Murphy has netted 20 votes. (The folks at the county appear to have gone home, as nobody is answering the phone.) These numbers are not in the state’s totals right now.
Looking at that Delaware County number for a second, if it’s true it would put Murphy ahead by three votes. But we really can’t take the number by itself at all, because other counties are continuing to tally votes, too.
However, the interesting part here is that Tedisco won this county overall in the Election Day count by 50.2%-49.8%. And the voter registrations for the returned absentee ballots show a Republican advantage of 151 GOP against 106 Dems, or 52%-37% as a percentage. If the Murphy campaign’s claim is true, then this could be a good omen of how the absentees might work out — or it might just be a fluke, to be counteracted by an as-yet unrevealed Tedisco pickup in a pro-Murphy county.
The counties are just getting started on counting the votes, and this process will take a while longer. For example, Columbia County told me they’ve made it through less than 100 ballots so far, out of nearly 1,000, and numbers haven’t been released for the votes counted so far.
Late Update: Tedisco attorney James E. Walsh just put out this statement:
“We are just now getting into the paper ballots and we expect that the numbers will continue to move, just as they did last week. As the day comes to a close, we feel very good about our position and continue to believe that the final tally will show Jim Tedisco as the winner. As we have said all along, the primary focus is to make sure that every lawful ballot be counted so that residents of the 20th district can have confidence in the ultimate outcome.”
