The right has been running with this report from the Syracuse Post-Standard showing that Doug Hoffman has been gaining in the recanvassing process in his race against Rep. Bill Owens in NY-23.
Democratic Rep. Bill Owens was quickly sworn into office on Friday, a day before the rare weekend vote in the House of Representatives. His support sealed his party’s narrow victory on the health care legislation.
Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections.
In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes — 12,748 to 11,000.
The new vote totals mean the race will be decided by absentee ballots, of which about 10,200 were distributed, said John Conklin, communications director for the state Board of Elections.
The key word there is “distributed”. Even if all 10,200 ballots were returned to the elections board, Hoffman would have to have won among absentees by about a 2-1 margin to take the lead, and that’s if Dede Scozzafava didn’t get a chunk of those votes. But only 5,400 absentee votes are outstanding, according to the Watertown Daily Times. A few more may come in, but they would have had to have been postmarked by Election Day to qualify. So even if we acknowledge that, say, 600 more ballots will arrive, that would mean that Hoffman would need approximately 75% of the remaining votes, and more for every vote that Scozzafava picks up. That’s highly unlikely, and the Hoffman campaign seems to know it.
I talked to Hoffman’s spokesman Rob Ryan, who said the campaign is keeping its own count, and that lawyers have checked out the polling places that reported the bogus numbers. But he was bearish on the campaign’s chances of a post-facto upset.
“It’s not something I would place a bet on,” said Ryan. “Even if the margin had been 3,000 votes on election night, we would have conceded. We just might have done it later.”
So while it’s interesting that the count is narrowing, I wouldn’t expect any change in the final result.
