About 500 ballots cast in Rosendale were missing from the Ulster County Board of Elections' unofficial tally last night, but have since been accounted for.
The new results are still unofficial, but the totals for local races are much closer to poll watchers' estimate of about 2100 ballots cast. Numbers posted on Democratic candidate Jan Metzger's website this morning show a Republican sweep of the town supervisor and town board races:
Town Supervisor
Jeanne Walsh (R) .. 1087
Jen Metzger (D) .. 1032Town Board (vote for 2)
Bob Ryan (R) .. 1097
Bob Gallagher (R) .. 1089
Alex Ferguson (D) .. 972
Rich F-Stop Minissali (D) .. 956
Ulster County Board of Elections Republican commissioner Tom Turco confirmed that the numbers on Metzger's website, while still unofficial, were correct.
The missing votes, said county Democratic commissioner Victor Work, were the result of human error: a machine operator reading the numbers wrong when calling them into the county. The optical-scan voting machines also have a digital record of the ballots cast, and that record included the missing votes.
"The poll watchers have been working 15 hours at that point, and they make mistakes when they read the numbers," he said. "When we got all the memory cards in from the voting machines, we uploaded them, and we found a discrepancy of about 500 votes."
Absentee ballots and affadavit ballots still remain to be counted. Work said that the county has 97 absentee ballots for Rosendale in hand, and is still waiting to receive about 25 more. He said about 50 affadavit ballots were cast as well.
Results will remain unofficial until the county certifies its elections -- a process that took until February last year, while a dispute over the election results in the 100th state Assembly district worked its way through the courts.
