Absentee vote results still more than a week away, officials say

ALBANY — The counting of more than 1.5 million absentee ballots cast statewide could begin as soon as Tuesday under law. But in practice, the sorting of the deluge of mail-in votes will mean many areas, including Long Island, won’t see final results at least until the end of next week, election officials said on Monday.

The Nassau County Board of Elections hopes to begin counting Thursday or Friday, while the Suffolk County’s elections board won’t start counting the paper ballots until Nov. 16.

Suffolk County will begin its count with the 3rd Congressional District race. In that contest, Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove) trails by 4,185 votes against Republican George Santos. But there are 86,597 absentee votes to be counted in that race. Of them, 47,039 were cast by Democrats; 16,004 were cast by Republicans; and 20,121 by voters not enrolled in a party, according the latest state Board of Elections tally.

Results will take days and could be announced when the count of each race is final or when all races are final. Those are among the issues to be settled in negotiations by the bipartisan boards of election in every county.

When results will be announced will depend on progress in the coming days, elections officials said. In Nassau County, for example, counting is expected to be complete in about 10 days after it starts and should be released when each race result is final. But that’s a big "if."

"I think if we are allowed to count, and no legal issues arise, we should be able to count it all in about 10 days," said James P. Scheuerman, Democratic commissioner for the Nassau County Board of Elections.

Much work remains as more absentee ballots are received by the deadline of the close of business on Tuesday.

The process includes checking absentee ballots statewide against ballots cast in person during early voting or on Nov. 3. Part of the review is to make sure no voter cast more than one vote. A computerized county-by-county database is used to collect all the absentee ballots, affidavit ballots cast because a voter’s registration couldn’t be verified at the polls, and military ballots. Postmarks must be checked to be sure the votes were cast on or before Nov. 3, the last day to cast a ballot.

"There are a lot of machinations we have to do behind the scenes," Scheuerman said.

On Monday, Suffolk County began its "3% audit." That compares machine tabulations of 3% of absentee ballots to hand-counted tallies of the same ballots. If the machine count isn’t perfect, election officials will determine why and fix it, and could do additional comparisons with 5% or 10% of the vote or more until officials are certain the machines are counting every valid ballot.

"We would rather be slow and meticulous," said Anita Katz, Democratic commissioner for the Suffolk County Board of Elections. "It’s always a big negotiation. We’ll probably do it by congressional district, but we’ll see. The schedule is day-to-day, lawyer by lawyer."

Every step of handling the absentee votes is done by a bipartisan team.

Results in counties such as Suffolk may not be known for days after Nov. 16. Several factors could further slow the process, including the number of disputed ballots debated by lawyers for parties and candidates and reviewed by election officials and judges.

"We will finish as quickly and accurately as we can," Katz said Monday.

Until then, the long hours and weekends worked by county elections officials will continue.

"We’re doing 7-7, 12-hour shifts until we get through this," Scheuerman said.

The influx of absentee ballots this year was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the State Legislature allowed concern about contracting the virus at crowded polls as one of the valid reasons to use absentee ballots. In the 2016 presidential election, 495,520 voters applied for absentee ballots. This year, 2.4 million ballots were requested and more than 1.56 million have been received so far, according to the state Board of Elections' latest count released on Friday.

By Michael Gormley

michael.gormley@newsday.com@GormleyAlbany

Michael Gormley has worked for Newsday since 2013, covering state government, politics and issues. He has covered Albany since 2001.