Inside Scoop on NY 20

I am beat.
I walked precincts all day for Jim Tedisco and when the polls closed I thought I could head to the party…but then things went awry. In the next 13 days political communications will play as important a role as the legal fight and I want you to know the facts.
The election is NOT over. There are still over 4,000 absentee ballots that have not been returned which totaled with the 6,000 already received would be almost 10,000 absentee ballots that have NOT been counted. These ballots will continue to be accepted until April. 13th. ANY premature counting of votes will, basically, be counting BEFORE the voting is over…and that is just wrong.
Jim Tedisco is currently trailing Scott Murphy by 59 votes according to machine tallies. NOTICE I did not say ballots. NY 20 uses old school level machines to vote so there is NO "ballot" to count. Votes are tabulated on the machine as people pull levers. Most of these machines are probably older than me.
The results you saw tonight were nothing more than the UNofficial notes of whichever random poll worker transcribed results from the machine to the form that they report to the Board of Elections. It is fair to say that these numbers are often riddled with mistakes as people mix up numbers and read the wrong tallies.

With memories of Washington State 2004 and Minnesota 2008 looming in my mind here are some things to consider.

Jim Tedisco will win the absentee vote.
The only way Scott Murphy can win is too challenge and disqualify absentee and military ballots that will, most likely, be votes for Jim Tedisco.
Scott Murphy is so anti-military he tried to stop Harvard from having a ROTC program on campus while he was a student there and prevent military personnel from teaching classes. Knowing that, it is hard to imagine military members voting for him.

It's 3:23 AM so forgive the horrible grammar and even worse sentence structure.

Chris Faulkner

P.S. Somehow I knew wearing my "Coleman Recount Team" polar fleece today was a bad idea …