I want to thank everyone who supported the
Working Families Party this election. Taking Back Congress was our top priority, and now Mike Arcuri, Kirsten Gillibrand and John Hall are headed to D.C. to be part of a new majority.
We want to know how many votes we got for our candidates. The official vote count is still happening so we don't have hard numbers yet, but we're up to 146,000 votes (and rising!) on Row E.
After the jump is a rundown on where things stand on counting the votes.
(This post is crossposted with pictures at
http://wfpjournal.blogspot.com/...)
At the end of election day, poll workers count the number of votes in each ED for each candidate on each ballot line. An election district, or ED, is the smallest voting district in New York, and each voting machine covers only one ED. The voting machines are then sealed and those poll worker vote counts become the unofficial returns that are reported on election night.
The voting machines then go back to the warehouse, where the Board of Elections has 15 days to verify the vote counts by recanvassing the machines. The recanvass works like this: each machine gets opened and a Board of Elections worker writes down how many votes each candidate got on each party's ballot line for that ED. If the recanvass counts a different number of votes than the poll workers counted on election night then the number from the recanvass is the official number that gets used.
The short version of that is you walk down row after row of voting machines and stop at each one to count the number of votes recorded for the election. You can see what workers are looking at on each machine at: http://wfpjournal.blogspot.com/...
There's 15 days from election day to finish the recanvass. How long the recanvass takes depends on where you are. The Staten Island recanvass took half a day, but in Manhattan the recanvass started at 10am on Tuesday and was about halfway done at 6pm. A contested election with representatives from multiple campaigns verifying the recanvass can take even longer.
What comes next? The paper ballots are counted, and after that the election is certified. That's when we'll know our official vote totals.
I'll post more updates on the vote count as I know more. Thanks again to everyone who voted!