Hoffman hasn't announced challenge
Conservative Party candidate Douglas L. Hoffman passed his self-appointed deadline Monday without declaring whether he'd challenge results in the 23rd Congressional District race.
Robert H. Ryan, Mr. Hoffman's spokesman, said the candidate would announce his decision today. He would not say what Mr. Hoffman's intentions were.
Rep. William L. Owens, D-Plattsburgh, leads the race by 3,397 votes, with 628 absentee ballots left to be counted, according to unofficial results. Mr. Owens led, according to unofficial election night results, by 5,335 votes, but a recheck of the machine vote in the 11-county district put the gap at 2,864 votes. The Democrat has added 533 votes during counting of absentee, emergency and affidavit ballots, which started Nov. 17.
Mr. Owens now has 72,711 total votes, or 48.3 percent, with Mr. Hoffman at 69,314 votes, or 46 percent. Republican Dierdre K. Scozzafava, who suspended her campaign three days before Election Day, has 8,619 votes, or 5.7 percent.
County elections boards must send results to the state elections board by Friday. The state board will certify the results at its Dec. 15 meeting.
Mr. Hoffman alleged Friday on the Washington Times America's Morning News radio program that there were three voting machines carrying a "virus" that were used on Election Day.
John Conklin, a state Board of Elections spokesman, has denied that the voting machines had a virus. He said that a software problem caused some Dominion voting systems to freeze during pre-election testing, but that most of the machines were fixed before Election Day. Mr. Hoffman also acknowledged on the radio show that the voting machines were reprogrammed before residents cast their ballots.
Mr. Conklin said some scanners did freeze on Election Day. In those instances, poll workers stopped using the voting machines and offered emergency paper ballots instead.
"In the end, the new optical scan voting systems guarantee we have ballots as marked by voters, ensuring that every vote is counted," the spokesman said.
Mr. Hoffman also contended that "many voting machines were showing me with zeros on election night."
Sean M. Hennessey, Jefferson County Democratic elections commissioner, has said poll inspectors in four districts reported Mr. Hoffman had received zero votes after inadvertently reading the wrong line of the poll system's printout.
The commissioner said the errors were made by the inspectors, not the machines. When the mistakes were discovered, the county's counts were changed to reflect Mr. Hoffman's true numbers.
Mr. Hoffman has appeared to back away from an earlier claim that the machines were tampered with by "ACORN, the unions and the Democratic Party."
John McCaslin, the radio co-host, asked Mr. Hoffman if he suspected that "somebody tampered with the software to change the votes that were actually cast to give a different result than the voters intended."
"No, we're not making that allegation," Mr. Hoffman said. "I think we have to congratulate the elections commissioners for doing the best job that they possibly could."
