NY-20 Special Election

[ucscgaldamez]

?

COLUMBIA COUNTY — 20th Congressional District candidate Republican Jim Tedisco submitted a petition to the Dutchess County Supreme Court Thursday asking the judge to declare him the winner of the extremely close special election race, despite the numbers currently being in favor of his opponent, Democrat Scott Murphy.

According to The Associated Press, Murphy leads Tedisco by 178 votes district wide — 79,452 to 79,274. The only ballots that have not been counted are those challenged by each candidate’s lawyers, and while Tedisco’s office has said the challenges are roughly evenly split between the two camps, Columbia County lawyers for Murphy have only challenged 22 ballots, while Tedisco’s have challenged 258.

Tedisco is also asking the court to authorize recanvasing of all machine ballots to acquire the “proper” tallies. He would like them to reassess the validity of absentee votes already counted, and keep ballots challenged by Tedisco unopened. County Board of Elections Democratic Commissioner Virginia Martin said this new development could result in the election taking quite a bit more time to be decided. She would not venture a guess on how long it will be before the 20th District has a representative in congress.

link?

It's really unbelievable.

[Lunar]

It's easy to find links by Googling a sentence in quotation marks, but here

http://www.registerstar.com/articles/2009/04/17/news/news02.txt

[Torie]

Did the Dems just steal another election Lunar? 

You know, I used to post on a site, where a popular opinion was that the Dems were a criminal conspiracy. 

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Free Republic?

[Tender Branson]

4678 of about 6700 absentee ballots have been counted so far.

Murphy has won 53% of them so far.

Tedisco would need to win roughly 55% of the remaining 2000 ballots to pull ahead again.

With the bulk of those absentees out from Columbia and Warren Counties, the odds of that happening aren't good.  The objected-to ballots in Saratoga shouldn't be anywhere close enough for Tedisco to take the lead again, let alone win when the Columbia votes come in.

1600 are now left to be counted and Tedisco needs 59% of them to win.

[Torie]

Free Republic?

That is it baby. I was the house "liberal" on the site (hard as that may be to believe), and the only poster (with any half life longer than a few days before being banned) who endorsed legalized gay marriage.

I was finally effectively driven off for supporting Rudy "the abortionist" Giuliani. Remember him?

[Bacon King]

Wow, Tedisco is just obnoxious.

I do like how Murphy's lead is gaining just enough so that it perfectly matches my prediction on this race, though.

And Torie I could never picture you as a freeper.

[Eraserhead]

Free Republic?

That is it baby. I was the house "liberal" on the site (hard as that may be to believe), and the only poster (with any half life longer than a few days before being banned) who endorsed legalized gay marriage.

I was finally effectively driven off for supporting Rudy "the abortionist" Giuliani. Remember him?

Why the hell would somebody like you bother posting in that cesspool?

[Brittain33]

I was finally effectively driven off for supporting Rudy "the abortionist" Giuliani. Remember him?

That was when I stopped reading the site. You don't get all of the credit; Jim Rob killed a whole flock of golden geese that week.

[Brittain33]

Why the hell would somebody like you bother posting in that cesspool?

As a media aggregator, Free Republic was second-to-none. It was the Twitter of its day. I went there on 9/11 for news updates because every media site was crashing while FR's servers were easily handling the posts from people watching tv all over the country.

[Marokai Backbeat]

?

COLUMBIA COUNTY — 20th Congressional District candidate Republican Jim Tedisco submitted a petition to the Dutchess County Supreme Court Thursday asking the judge to declare him the winner of the extremely close special election race, despite the numbers currently being in favor of his opponent, Democrat Scott Murphy.

According to The Associated Press, Murphy leads Tedisco by 178 votes district wide — 79,452 to 79,274. The only ballots that have not been counted are those challenged by each candidate’s lawyers, and while Tedisco’s office has said the challenges are roughly evenly split between the two camps, Columbia County lawyers for Murphy have only challenged 22 ballots, while Tedisco’s have challenged 258.

Tedisco is also asking the court to authorize recanvasing of all machine ballots to acquire the “proper” tallies. He would like them to reassess the validity of absentee votes already counted, and keep ballots challenged by Tedisco unopened. County Board of Elections Democratic Commissioner Virginia Martin said this new development could result in the election taking quite a bit more time to be decided. She would not venture a guess on how long it will be before the 20th District has a representative in congress.

When all else fails, deny reality.

[minionofmidas]

?

COLUMBIA COUNTY — 20th Congressional District candidate Republican Jim Tedisco submitted a petition to the Dutchess County Supreme Court Thursday asking the judge to declare him the winner of the extremely close special election race, despite the numbers currently being in favor of his opponent, Democrat Scott Murphy.

According to The Associated Press, Murphy leads Tedisco by 178 votes district wide — 79,452 to 79,274. The only ballots that have not been counted are those challenged by each candidate’s lawyers, and while Tedisco’s office has said the challenges are roughly evenly split between the two camps, Columbia County lawyers for Murphy have only challenged 22 ballots, while Tedisco’s have challenged 258.

Tedisco is also asking the court to authorize recanvasing of all machine ballots to acquire the “proper” tallies. He would like them to reassess the validity of absentee votes already counted, and keep ballots challenged by Tedisco unopened. County Board of Elections Democratic Commissioner Virginia Martin said this new development could result in the election taking quite a bit more time to be decided. She would not venture a guess on how long it will be before the 20th District has a representative in congress.

When all else fails, deny reality.

Ban reality.

[Landslide Lyndon]

When all else fails, deny reality.

Wasn't that George W. Bush's motto?

[Lunar]

Update on my earlier post

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/04/about-that-tedisco-filing.php


The blogosphere has been abuzz about a reported filing by Republican Congressional candidate Jim Tedisco, asking to be declared the winner in the NY-20 special election. Does the filing really say that he should be declared the winner, notwithstanding the fact that he's down in the count?

Not exactly. I've now had the chance to look through the filing, and what it really does is formally state Tedisco's goal of being declared the winner -- after all, you can't go to court without some kind of specified goal -- and then it goes into the various complaints that Tedisco has, mainly relating to challenges against Murphy voters as being allegedly ineligible to vote in the election.

The Tedisco campaign clarified to The Hill that this filing was made in order to establish Tedisco's legal standing, as an "insurance policy" against questions about the standing of the local party officials who first challenged the election before the polls even closed.

So make no mistake that Tedisco is contesting this result -- but that's not news, as the litigation has been going on literally since Election Day. This latest filing is just one more procedural step along the way.

[Torie]

Wow, Tedisco is just obnoxious.

I do like how Murphy's lead is gaining just enough so that it perfectly matches my prediction on this race, though.

And Torie I could never picture you as a freeper.

I was under a satanic spell. Finally events transpired to rescue me from myself.

[Rob]

COLUMBIA COUNTY — 20th Congressional District candidate Republican Jim Tedisco submitted a petition to the Dutchess County Supreme Court Thursday asking the judge to declare him the winner of the extremely close special election race, despite the numbers currently being in favor of his opponent, Democrat Scott Murphy.

Pathetic. This just makes me mad...

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

?

COLUMBIA COUNTY — 20th Congressional District candidate Republican Jim Tedisco submitted a petition to the Dutchess County Supreme Court Thursday asking the judge to declare him the winner of the extremely close special election race, despite the numbers currently being in favor of his opponent, Democrat Scott Murphy.

According to The Associated Press, Murphy leads Tedisco by 178 votes district wide — 79,452 to 79,274. The only ballots that have not been counted are those challenged by each candidate’s lawyers, and while Tedisco’s office has said the challenges are roughly evenly split between the two camps, Columbia County lawyers for Murphy have only challenged 22 ballots, while Tedisco’s have challenged 258.

Tedisco is also asking the court to authorize recanvasing of all machine ballots to acquire the “proper” tallies. He would like them to reassess the validity of absentee votes already counted, and keep ballots challenged by Tedisco unopened. County Board of Elections Democratic Commissioner Virginia Martin said this new development could result in the election taking quite a bit more time to be decided. She would not venture a guess on how long it will be before the 20th District has a representative in congress.

He's the Republican, so he won. Republicans always win close elections. He's no more of a hypocrite than Coleman, who is using Bush's lawyers from 2000 to argue that his case should be dragged out as long as possible (exactly the opposite of what they were arguing in 2000). But yes, Republicans are crap.

[justfollowingtheelections]

I would feel awful if I was a Republican and had to constantly defend the foolish things people in my party did.

[Zarn]

When all else fails, deny reality.

Wasn't that George W. Bush's motto?

Yeah, it's actually one of the things Obama adopted from Bush.

[Marokai Backbeat]

When all else fails, deny reality.

Wasn't that George W. Bush's motto?

Yeah, it's actually one of the things Obama adopted from Bush.

Are you and Rowan a couple?

[Tender Branson]

With all of the unchallenged absentee and overseas military ballots counted, Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by 273 votes and looks in extremely strong position to prevail in the New York special election.

Murphy has 79,839 votes, while Tedisco has 79,566 votes.

Fueling Democratic optimism is the source of the 1,773 ballots that have been challenged by both campaigns, and left out of the current count. According to a database provided by the Murphy campaign, the plurality of those challenged ballots were cast by registered Democrats.

Of the 1,773 ballots not included in the count, 810 were cast by registered Democrats, 653 were from registered Republicans and 310 were from independent or unaffiliated voters.

That registration breakdown makes it nearly impossible for Tedisco to overcome his 273-vote deficit. Registered Democrats overwhelmingly voted for Murphy in the election, so it's fairly safe to conclude that Murphy will net additional votes as many of the challenged ballots get counted.

Democrats also estimate that Tedisco’s campaign has objected to twice as many ballots across the district as Murphy’s campaign – consistent with the registration patterns of the challenged ballots. So if most of these ballots end up in the count, expect Murphy to ultimately win by around 700-800 votes.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/scorecard/0409/Murphy_on_track_to_win_special_election.html

It's time for Tedisco to concede ...

[Ebowed]

Just call him "Landslide Tedisco"...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Hilarious.

[Zarn]

When all else fails, deny reality.

Wasn't that George W. Bush's motto?

Yeah, it's actually one of the things Obama adopted from Bush.

Are you and Rowan a couple?

No, I'm just not blind.

[You kip if you want to...]

Any updates?