Troubles continue in contested State Senate race

The contested State Senate seat in Nassau County entered a statistical and legal morass with additional uncounted ballots popping up, arguments erupting over the ongoing audit of the new optical-scan voting machines and a judge indicating he might expand the sampling of ballots.

Justice Ira Warshawsky was visibly annoyed when he took the bench shortly after 2 p.m. and demanded to know why he was just learning of the existence of 288 paper ballots that had not been tallied.

Meanwhile, in Yaphank, Rep. Tim Bishop (D-Southampton) saw his lead over Randy Altschuler decrease by 14 votes Tuesday but the four-term incumbent still leads the St. James Republican by 221 votes, officials from both campaigns said Tuesday.

Altschuler netted 20 votes over Bishop in the counting of 71 ballots cast by overseas military personnel, but Bishop then netted six votes when officials counted 258 previously challenged absentee and affidavit ballots, spokesmen for the Altschuler and Bishop campaigns said.

In Mineola, attorneys on both sides of the State Senate race said all but 113 of the 288 ballots were invalid for a variety of reasons. They disagreed on the remaining 113, with Republicans saying they should not be counted. Democrats said the party's elections commissioner did not have a chance to review them because he had been busy with the count of absentee ballots in the Senate race and the state-mandated audit of 32 of the 1,071 new optical-scan voting machines.

Bob McDonald, representing the Democratic elections commissioner, said he understood why the judge was angry at finding about the questionable ballot almost a month after the election. "I'm not angry; I'm annoyed," the judge interjected.

McDonald said he would report back to the judge this morning on what a Democratic review of the 113 paper ballots showed.

In court in Mineola Tuesday, attorney Steven Schlesinger, representing incumbent Democrat Craig Johnson, who trails Republican challenger Jack Martins by 438 votes, continued to press for a hand count of all 85,000 ballots cast in the 7th State Senate District. Attorney John Ryan, representing the Republican elections commissioner, said Democrats were raising objections during the machine audit to try to ensure that the countywide audit of 32 machines had a failure rate that would trigger a larger audit of more than 50 additional machines.

The judge said he would not consider his idea for expanding the ballot review until the Board of Elections reports to him Thursday on the audit.

In the Bishop-Altschuler race there are more than 1,600 ballots to which the campaigns have outstanding objections. The Democratic and GOP elections commissioners began the laborious task of voting on each individual objection Tuesday afternoon and hope to finish the task by 3 p.m. Wednesday when State Supreme Court Judge Peter Mayer may visit the Board of Elections in Yaphank.

With Reid J. Epstein