As of Thursday, Suffolk County, on the eastern end of Long Island, still hadn’t given any public updates on its tally of more than 160,000 absentee ballots.
Some county election boards chose to give absentee vote tallies to the candidates, but not the public.The slowness of some New York counties in releasing absentee vote tallies has been less of an issue in past years because, historically, the state hasn’t had a very big mail-in vote.But a record number of mail-in ballots were cast this year after state officials decided to allow anyone to vote by absentee as a way of thinning crowds at polling stations during the coronavirus pandemic.But news of that dwindling lead came mostly from the candidates themselves, not the county election boards tallying the vote.
In Oswego County, one of the eight counties involved in tabulating that race, Elections Commissioner Laura Brazak, a Democrat, defended her board’s practice of giving updates on absentee vote totals only to the candidates’ representatives and not to the media or public.The state leaves it up to counties to decide when to release updates on their tallies of the absentee vote, said Jerry Goldfeder, an election law attorney who’s represented New York candidates for 40 yearsSome county officials said they believed they weren’t allowed to update the public on absentee vote totals in races where candidates had gone to court over ballot issues, but Goldfeder said he’s never recalled a state judge ruling that a county cannot release updates on absentee ballot tallies before results are made official