Just as a reminder, during the election earlier this month, voters in New York State roundly rejected a ballot measure that would have permanently allowed unlimited early mail-in voting without requiring an excuse for needing an absentee ballot. After everyone finishes reading about this story they may be breathing a sigh of relief in terms of the bullet they managed to dodge. In upstate New York’s Onondaga County, it was “discovered” yesterday that nearly 1,000 mail-in ballots were never counted after the polls closed. Now they are going back and beginning the process of recounting all of the mail-in ballots yet again. While these are all local races, for the most part, many of them were quite close and the official results of many of them are back up in the air. And as we’ll review in a moment, this is hardly the first time that this region has encountered “mysterious” issues with counting the ballots. (Syracuse.com)

Onondaga County will recount all votes cast during the nine-day early voting period in October after finding that 802 ballots were not counted in the final results.

The uncounted ballots could affect about a dozen close races in Manlius and other eastern suburbs of Syracuse, said Dustin Czarny, an Onondaga County elections commissioner.

All told, 9,721 Onondaga County residents voted from Oct. 23 to Oct. 31 at six early voting sites in the county. The votes were included with the Election Day totals reported Nov. 2.

All of the local news outlets are bending over backward to declare that this was a simple “human error” that led to the more than 800 votes not being counted. (Heaven forbid anyone should think there was any hanky-panky going on, right?) In fact, in the five local news items covering this story that I located this morning, the phrase “human error” appeared in the article headline of all of them. Perhaps that’s the case, but it’s a human error that happened three times at two separate polling places.

In each case, it’s claimed that the ballot-scanning machines were “shut down improperly” at the end of the day, leading to zero votes being recorded at those polling places for the entire day. And nobody noticed until now during a routine recanvassing. That means that 802 out of a total of 9,721 votes cast in that county weren’t counted. That’s approaching 10% so this is definitely a big deal.

Onondaga is one of three counties in the northern end of New York’s 22nd congressional district that ran into severe ballot-counting issues after the 2020 election. As you may recall, that was the heart of the issue that prevented the winner of that congressional seat from being declared until the second week of February this year. There is still a huge asterisk next to the results of that race to this day. Nobody is supposed to say the words aloud because of the threat it poses to democracy or something, but the truth is that we don’t know if Republican Claudia Tenney really won back her seat or if Democrat Anthony Brindisi should still be in it. We’re never going to know.

In case you missed it, during the height of what became known as “StickyGate,” Oneida County (next door to Onondaga) had stored their mountain of write-in ballots in boxes with the high-tech process of putting sticky notes on them indicating which ones had been counted, which had been rejected, and which were set aside for review. When they went back to open the boxes during the recount, hundreds of the sticky notes had fallen off. When a judge eventually forced a county election official to stand before him and asked if he could definitively say which votes had been counted and which ones hadn’t, the official simply said, “Your honor, I can not.”

The number of unverifiable ballots in those three counties far, far exceeded the razor-thin margin of victory that sent Tenney back to Congress. On top of that, one of the counties recorded 54 people who showed up to vote in person on election day after already having mailed in a completed ballot. Three ballots were received from dead people. (And those are just the ones they managed to catch because a poll worker recognized the name of someone whose funeral they had attended.)

Despite all of this, the Democratic Party is still engaged in a push to take this mass mail-in voting scheme and expand it to be mandatory across the nation. What could possibly go wrong, right? That should be telling all of us something. To modify an old political term, when they show you who they are, believe them.