The extremely close election in the 20th Congressional District has partisans on both sides predicting their candidate will win after all the paper ballots are counted. Each side seems to have already determined who received the most votes among the 6,000-10,000 paper ballots that none of them has seen.
Before everybody goes completely nuts, I think it’s a good idea to remind people that nobody knows for sure who is even ahead right now on the machine vote – Murphy or Tedisco might be ahead by hundreds of votes not the handful reported.
I’m reposting some of what Doug Kellner; the Democratic Co-Chair of the New York State Board wrote last year during the ridiculous controversy over whether or not, the Board of Elections had “stolen” votes from Barack Obama. Doug’s report includes some particular facts that only apply to New York City but the gist of it explains how New York State counts votes:
At the close of the polls, the election inspectors manually copy the numbers from the voting machines onto the "canvass report," which is prepared in triplicate. One copy goes to the borough office of the Board of Elections together with all provisional and emergency ballots. A second copy is maintained by the local police precinct. A third copy is used by a clerk at the local police precinct who types the numbers into the police department main frame computer, which is immediately available to the Election News Service, a local media consortium, who eventually receive the third hard copy of the official canvass report.
Everyone in New York knows that the election night numbers typed by the police clerks are very unreliable and filled with typographical errors. Most of the local Democratic clubs have watchers present at the close of the polls who record the numbers independently. In this particular race, most clubs had both Obama and Clinton supporters who freely shared their numbers. It has been my experience that the numbers collected by the local political organizations are much more accurate than the numbers distributed to the media through their election night consortium.
The silver lining is that because everyone knows that these election night numbers are filled with typographical errors, no one I know (except the media!) ever relies of these numbers. New York has a mandatory, 100% recanvass, which both election officials and the political candidates generally take very seriously, even when the races are not close.