Nassau County aiming for faster election results

Daily Point

Speedier count for Nassau but the vote still gets a police escort

Nassau County's Board of Elections, notoriously slow in counting the suburban vote, is expecting to deliver faster results Tuesday evening when all eyes certainly will be on how County Executive Bruce Blakeman fares on his home territory.

The board is using a new software vendor and again trying an intermediary step to decentralize the electronic data transmission to speed up the process. "We are hoping to cut out at least one hour to 90 minutes" from when polls close and the results are available on the county website, said James Scheuerman, the Democratic elections commissioner for Nassau County.

Here's how it will work. Once a polling location closes and the new voting machines in use this year are turned off, the bipartisan team of election supervisors at that site will collect the flash drives aka "sticks" from each one and drive them to the nearest of the 18 police stations around the county. Those include the county's police precincts as well as village police headquarters and those in the cities of Long Beach and Glen Cove.

At these satellite locations, teams comprised of Democrat and Republican election workers will upload the sticks — all 1,032 of them — via the board's intranet network for posting on its website. Then, as required by state election law, Nassau County police officers will drive the sticks, and their backups, to election headquarters in Mineola for verification and storage. Nassau is the only one of New York's 62 counties required to have police "immediately transmit by telegraph, telephone or messenger" unofficial election results. It's a quirk that no one has yet been able to explain to The Point.

Previously, election workers brought their sticks to their designated satellite location where police waited until all the area's sticks were delivered, before driving them to Mineola. It was there they were uploaded.

Last year, a test program using the satellite model failed when the volume of data overloaded the system. "We have put the new system through its paces, stress tested and we feel great about it," said Scheuerman.

— Rita Ciolli rita.ciolli@newsday.com

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Final Point

Blakeman's turn to try a county-to-state transition

The elected post of county executive in New York State has never before been a steppingstone to the governor's mansion.

Not even close.

But Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman and his supporters seek to change that Tuesday in his bid to upset incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul.

Consider the pattern.

In 2018, as Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ran for and won his third term, the Republican nominee was Marc Molinaro, at the time the Dutchess County executive. Molinaro got only 36% of the statewide vote that year. This occurred during what proved to be the second of Molinaro's three terms in the county job.

The previous statewide contest in 2014 featured Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino as the GOP nominee. He garnered 40% of the vote on Election Day against Cuomo, who won his second term that year. Astorino served two four-year terms as executive, from January 2010 to December 2017.

Four years earlier, in what proved to be the first election of Cuomo, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy announced he'd quit the Democratic Party and would run as a Republican for governor. The dramatic effort failed. At that point he still needed a Wilson Pakula authorization for the GOP line and didn't receive enough weighted convention votes to reach the required 51%. Carl Paladino of Buffalo became the nominee and lost to Cuomo.

Nassau County Executive Thomas R. Suozzi took a shot at the top prize in 2006. He ran and lost against Eliot Spitzer in the Democratic primary, who won his ill-fated term as governor that year. (That was Suozzi's first failed bid for governor; as a congressman he lost the 2022 primary to Hochul.)

Four consecutive statewide elections, four suburban county executives in the mix. None came close to success. A politician's popularity and familiarity in one of 62 counties don't easily extend to the rest of the state. Localities still have their own character.

Forty years ago, the affable Westchester County Executive Andrew O'Rourke took on what proved to be the impossible task of unseating Gov. Mario M. Cuomo seeking his first reelection. At first Cuomo was iffy about debating O'Rourke, so the Republican carried around a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Democratic incumbent and called into a live radio show featuring the governor. They eventually debated, once, that October.

O'Rourke lost to Cuomo 65%-32%. By the way: In third place, with 3%, was Nassau County District Attorney Denis E. Dillon, who ran on the anti-abortion Right to Life line. Unsurprisingly, both O'Rourke and Dillon returned to their elected countywide jobs after the statewide loss, having retained them while campaigning all through 1986.

That's the history, in a nutshell, of local officials who try leaping to the top of the state.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

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