7th SD: courtroom scenes

 NEWSDAY SPIN CYCLE

The Final Act on this very close election???

8:58 AM By William Murphy

Photo credit: Newsday, William Murphy, 2010

Lawyers in the Johnson-Martins state Senate race will be in court for a rare Saturday session to review the performance of the new optical scan voting machines.

Here are some notebook leftovers from previous hearings on whether disputed paper ballots should be counted:

1) There was the case of Dead Man Walking Johnson, a Mineola man who showed up to vote Nov. 2nd, but he was not on the list of registered voters. He was allowed to fill out an affidavit ballot, and when elections workers later checked his history as part of their close examination of paper ballots in the Martins-Johnson race, it found he was dead to them.
Mr. Johnson’s wife apparently had gotten into a dispute with her husband and wrote a letter to the Board of Elections in 2007 saying he was dead, election lawyers said. A curious kind of revenge the lawyers agreed, and they agreed, with prodding from Justice Ira Warshawsky, that his vote should be counted.
(That also led to some byplay about the dead voters who once formed a solid voting bloc in the City of Long Beach. But that was many years ago, of course.)

2) Some voters did not properly fill out the back of their affidavit ballots, but attorney Steven Schlesinger noted that the county’s Reference Guide for (Poll) Inspectors refers only to a “primary election affidavit oath,” so poll inspectors might have thought that voters were not required to fill it out for the general election. Justice Warshawsky issued one of his many sighs that day and plowed ahead.

3) Turning to an absentee ballot that was mailed in by a voter, the judge noted that someone other than the voter had written on the application form that an absentee ballot, apparently from a nursing home, was necessary because the voter was “development disabled/death,” but probably meant “deaf,” the judge said.

“The court is somewhat concerned about who is voting for themselves — or the facility manager — because the person voting did not fill this (application form) out,” the judge said. He added at another point: “Someone should check and see if these people exist.”

4) Another voter filled out an absentee application a decade ago with a firm hand, but signed another form a day later with handwriting so bad that it indicated, “some kind of trauma,” the judge said.

5) Poll workers required a man with an Asian name to fill out an affidavit ballot because they confused his first name and his last name and couldn’t find him on the list of registered voters.

6) Sometimes the voters got confused. One woman misunderstood what 7th SD (Senate District) stood for, and wrote in “I am in school district 10.” School board elections are in May.