Nassau state Senate race down to absentee ballots

Election officials in Nassau County will begin counting about 3,000 absentee and affidavit ballots Thursday in the hotly contested 7th District race between incumbent Democrat State Sen. Craig Johnson of Port Washington and his Republican challenger, Mineola Mayor Jack Martins.

This comes after officials Wednesday tallied votes from a broken machine at Floral Park Memorial High School as well as a few of the 149 emergency ballots still to be counted. At the end of the day, Martins widened his lead by 74 votes to 489. The remaining 132 emergency ballots will be counted today.

Officials spent several hours Wednesday double-checking all 260 machines used in the election.

"We were double-checking and the results show that the poll workers had done what we asked them to do. We found that no emergency ballots had been missed," said Carol Busketta, the acting Republican commissioner of the Nassau Board of Elections.

Meanwhile, officials in Suffolk were conducting the state-mandated audit of 3 percent of the new voting machines. At 5 p.m., Suffolk auditors were working on the third and fourth of the 43 machines they planned to check and had yet to find an error. Nassau officials said they had not begun their audit.

U.S. Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) and Republican challenger Randy Altschuler are keeping a close eye on the Suffolk audit, as Altschuler leads Bishop by 383 votes in their race for the First Congressional District seat.

The tedious chores in the second-floor warehouse of the Nassau Board of Elections in Mineola belied the huge importance of the work, which could help decide whether Democrats or Republicans control the State Senate for the next two years.

There are three State Senate races that are too close to call: Johnson-Martins in the 7th Senate District in Nassau County, the 37th District in Westchester and the 60th District in Buffalo. Democrats must win all three to retain control of the Senate; Republicans need to win two to regain the control they lost in the 2008 election.

With stakes that high, lawyers for Nassau County and the Democratic and Republican county parties consented to a court order on Election Day that would place any disputes in any county election before Justice Ira Warshawsky of State Supreme Court in Mineola.

The lawyers spent most of the morning in Warshawsky's courtroom. Later they returned to board offices and disagreed over what the judge had ruled and had to conduct a telephone conference call with him.

During the three-hour court proceeding, Warshawsky did not rule on whether there should be a hand recount in the 7th District. "We're not there yet," he told the lawyers.

With Patrick Whittle