[Update 4/1/09: Murphy’s lead shrank to just 25 votes “after local election officials began double-checking totals and their math today”.]
Can’t you citizens make up your minds?! Please?! The NY-20 U.S. House Special Election held today to fill the vacant seat of now Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is, of course, too close to call. Big time. Sigh.
The Democratic candidate Scott Murphy leads the Republican Jim Tedisco by just 65 25 votes out of more than 150,000 votes cast at the polls (lever machines, the last state to have them), with 100% of the precincts now having reported in tonight. It would be quite a come-from-behind victory for Murphy if he’s able to pull it off, as Tedisco had been leading in the polls, in the heavily Republican district, until just a few days ago.
Of course, this will all now come down to the absentee ballots cast in the race. Just like Minnesota. The NY Board of Elections must now work out a schedule for their counting, as there are still a number of days for those to come in. It’s being reported tonight that some 10,055 absentee ballots went out, “including 1,882 military and overseas ballots, of which 5,907 total had been returned” so far.
As Gregg Levine at FDL noticed earlier this afternoon, in a peculiar legal move, the NY Republican Party filed a strange legal motion [PDF], long before the polls were even closed, including this pre-emptive election challenge:
That part of the motion, Levine reports in a followup was “struck out by the court on the spot”. They didn’t buy the old “heads I win, tails you lose” routine from the GOP, apparently.
But the last graf of Eric Kleefeld’s TPM coverage of the NY-20 race tonight deserves an all-time special prize:
UPDATE 4/8/09: Over the past week, the lead has shifted back and forth several times between Murpy and Tedisco in advance of the hand-count of some 7,000 absentee paper ballots set to begin today. We’ve got a quick update on the week’s roller coaster ride as the count gets underway, now posted here…
These R’s are the biggest whiners, lol
So, ‘If I win, hurry up and seat me and if I lose, don’t seat my opponent’
What pathetic losers
I mean, can’t you smell the Fascism here in this instance?
It reeks of it.
It also proves , like Minnesota, that they will do anything to win including lying, cheating, or outright theft.
Here we go, folks
Doesn’t it seem too convenient how all these elections come down to within a hundred votes. I mean Minnesota, Florida, New York, etc. We need a statistician or probability expert to figure the odds on this. Damn its important to work on clean elections. Thanks Brad and Friends!!!!
This article, along with Sen. Cronyn’s WW III threat should Democrats dare to seat Franken upon a determination by MN’s courts that Franken had indeed received the most votes, underscores the fact that the hard-right which currently controls the Republican Party is a “revolutionary power” that does not accept the legitimacy of our constitutional democracy. It also demonstrates the classic definition of chutzpa–the little boy who murdered his parents, then asked the court for mercy because he’s now an orphan.
The basic idea in an election is that the candidate who receives the most votes is the one who is elected. The hard-right is all for that democratic principle so long as the voters select the “right” candidate. Here, Jim Tedisco knew going in that he was in trouble.
“One GOP source said internal polling showed Tedisco down by two to three percentage points as of Friday, which is about what the last Siena NY poll found, too.” http://www.nydailynews.com/blog...la-delgue.html
Someone who accepted the legitimacy of the electoral process could reasonably be expected to await the initial count and then demand a recount if the vote is this close. But Tedisco doesn’t accept the legitimacy of the democratic process. He doesn’t even wait for the polls to close, let alone for the votes to be counted, before running into court, where he obtains an order that the NY State Board of elections appear today and show cause why it should not certify Tedisco as duly elected.
Why, Mr. Tedisco? How bout the fact that your opponent received 65 more votes than you did?
Ernest A. Canning
Attorney at Law
Due probably to normal post-election night canvasing, math errors being corrected, etc., the margin is now down to 25 votes.
“…elections come down to within a hundred votes… We need a statistician or probability expert to figure the odds on this.”
As usual, the folks at FiveThirtyEight.com are way ahead of us…
“…in the period 1900-1992, there were 20,597 contested elections, of which 6 were decided by fewer than 10 votes and 49 decided by fewer than 100 votes.”
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/...every-400.html
Well, as a person who votes on the list “Absentee Ballot for Homebound Disabled”, who always wonders if my vote is actually counted, I’m smiling as absentee ballots ARE being counted, someplace. And mean something. Of course, I feel more comfortable about elections being “clean” when there’s a big margin of victory.
As the figures are double-checked it was a tie for a while but now Murphy has picked up 198 votes:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo....xes-errors.php
Should that 198 vote lead hold while waiting for the absentee ballots to be counted it would definitely be a good thing for Murphy.