BY CELESTE KATZ
State Senate District 27: The election that keeps on giving... us no final answers.
The tables have turned again in the long-running Brooklyn race, and now Democrat Lew Fidler is up 87 votes over Republican David Storobin.
With a new batch of ballots released for counting, Fidler Campaign Manager Kalman Yeger has his man up 11,050 to 10,963 after today's court proceedings. (For awhile there, Storobin remained up by three votes while counting was on hold as the two sides tussled in court.)
This election still isn't resolved, and there are a whole slew of interesting things that could happen during a full hand recount of the ballots. More on that in a moment.
Said Yeger in a statement, “Today, the Board of Elections was finally able to proceed with the long-delayed vote count after Mr. Storobin withdrew the bulk of his bogus challenges to lawfully cast ballots. The result is clear: the voters chose Lew Fidler to be our State Senator.
“While Mr. Storobin’s illegal voting scheme is still being heard in court, it is clear that the majority of lawfully cast ballots were cast for Lew Fidler," Yeger continued. “Lew continues to look forward to the swift conclusion of this count so he can get to work in Albany fighting for our community.”
Unsurprisingly, Storobin rep David Simpson sees it differently:
"There are still more than 130 ballots yet to be counted, almost all of which we expect will be cast for David Storobin and will make him the winner. These ballots are being held up in court by Mr. Fidler's legal team in an attempt to steal this election by disenfranchising Russian voters on a bogus fraud claim. These votes were cast legally in accordance with election law governing absentee ballots, and we're proving that in court," Simpson said.
"After the Fidler campaign exhausts its legal maneuvering and the court orders those ballots to be counted, Mr. Fidler's premature victory claim is going to make him look pretty silly."
The votes to which Simpson refers, of course, are related to the absentee-ballot fraud accusations lodged by Team Fidler against Alla Pometko, a Storobin campaign consultant.
Now, back to the strange things that could happen in a hand recount.
One of our resident Board of Elections experts pointed out a few possibilities for how candidates could gain or lose votes in such a recount, which is triggered if the final margin of victory is .5% or less.
Ballots could be tallied differently by hand than they were from the machine downloads.
The scanners are only programmed to read the ballots they're fed in a very specific way. It's similar to the grading of SAT tests. However, election law requires that the intent of the voter be taken into account.
(My apologies if anyone has a hanging-chad nightmare after reading this.)
The computer may not register the choice of a voter who circles, underlines or otherwise indicates a preference for one candidate over the other, but inspectors in a hand count would have consider what the voter was trying to say.
The scanners are also programmed to ignore pretty much everything but properly cast votes. Again, that might not be the case in a hand recount: A ballot could be disqualified if it's found to have an "identifying mark" such a signature.
While all this is going on, of course, the Legislative session is ebbing away.
And under the new state Senate redistricting maps, the SD-27 Fidler and Storobin ran for isn't long for this world anyhow...
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