Recounts proceed in Nassau and Suffolk races
Nassau County election volunteers continue count absentee ballots in Mineola, Tuesday. (Nov. 16, 2010) Credit: Danielle Finkelstein
Two weeks after Election Day, officials in both Nassau and Suffolk counties were poring over absentee ballots Tuesday as they tried to determine the winner of a key State Senate race in Nassau and a congressional race in Suffolk.
In Nassau, Jack Martins, the Republican mayor of Mineola, holds a 236-vote lead in his bid to unseat Democrat Craig Johnson, who won office in a special election in the 7th State Senate District in 2007. Martins has 41,990 votes and Johnson 41,754, county officials said.
In Suffolk, Republican challenger Randy Altschuler held a 356-vote lead over incumbent Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop in the 1st Congressional District as workers began sorting through some 11,000 absentee ballots.
Tuesday, officials counted absentee ballots from 24 election districts in Smithtown and 10 in Southampton.
Republicans have seized firm control of the House of Representatives, so the Altschuler-Bishop race has no impact beyond the district, but the Martins-Johnson race is one of three races that will decide which party controls the State Senate for the next two years.
Meanwhile, Suffolk officials continued the state-mandated review Tuesday of 3 percent of the new optical-scan voting machines and reported no errors. Nassau was to start its audit Wednesday.
Bishop had been ahead on election night by 3,461 votes, but the initial phoned-in tally - not the machine tally - was wrong in 173 of 460 election districts, with 30 districts off by 10 or more votes for each.
Officials in both counties said they expected the count of absentee ballots to continue into next week.
An absentee ballot from Bishop's bedridden, 86-year-old father was one of the ones challenged Tuesday, according to Bishop's campaign.
Five teams of Board of Election workers were reviewing those ballots, and more than 20 representatives from the Democratic and Republican parties were watching the work and pointing out possible problems with the ballots.
A spokesman for the Altschuler campaign said Bishop's parents were not singled out, but theirs could be among the scores of ballots challenged for a variety of reasons.
Jon Schneider, a Bishop spokesman, said Bishop's father, an 11th-generation Southampton Village native, was housebound and unable to travel, and so voted by absentee ballot from Florida.
The ballots marked for challenge will be reviewed by both election commissioners. If they fail to agree on the validity of a ballot, a judge will make the ultimate decision.
