Absentee ballot counting complete

CANTON — The St. Lawrence County Board of Elections has finished counting absentee ballots, but the results of some local races may remain unknown until work on write-in votes wraps up Monday.

Officials have called the Lawrence town highway superintendent's race — which they originally reported as being within one vote — for Randall N. Aiken. The Republican incumbent beat out his Democrat opponent Gary Sirles, 254-156.

Elections officials erroneously reported that Mr. Sirles polled within one vote of Mr. Aiken on election night, with the Republican listed as having 150 instead of 250 votes. Mr. Sirles had 149 votes.

After absentee ballots were counted, Mr. Aiken picked up seven votes and Mr. Sirles added four to his tally.

"That was an error on our behalf. We found it when we were recanvassing," said Erin T. Hughes, Democratic elections clerk. "That was the only race we had issues with, as far as I know."

Inspectors have been working to recanvass and audit results for voting machines that malfunctioned on Election Day. There were problems with the new voting machines in eight districts Nov. 3.

"It has been a very slow recanvassing with the new machines," Ms. Hughes said. "There's a new process of hand-counting every vote. It takes a lot longer to do the audit than the older ones."

In the 23rd Congressional District race, Rep. William L. Owens, D-Plattsburgh, picked up 433 votes. Conservative Party candidate Douglas L. Hoffman had 284 absentee votes, while Republican Dierdre K. Scozzafava garnered 347 votes.

The results of a couple of municipal races remain uncertain while elections officials count write-in ballots. Officials hope to have the final write-in votes counted by Monday. There were write-in campaigns that could change election results in the Russell town supervisor race and the Potsdam village trustee race.

Several county machines froze on Election Day, forcing inspectors to switch to paper ballots. Other machines didn't print out results when inspectors closed the polls. At some locations with multiple districts sharing one scanner, poll workers were unable to break down the votes between the election districts when they pulled the count register out of the machines.