Photo credit: Newsday, William Murphy, 2010
Lawyers are due back in court at 2 p.m. Thursday in the Martins-Johnson race in Nassau County.Justice Ira Warshawsky of state Supreme Court in Mineola was toying with the idea of a sample hand count of ballots in the race, in which Republican challenger Jack Martins has a 450-vote lead over Democratic incumbent Craig Johnson in the 7th SD.
One of interested parties probably will not be in court. That would be state Sen. Dean Skelos of Rockville Centre, (seen above watching the count of paper ballots in the Martins-Johnson race) who will in all likelihood be majority leader again if Martins wins.
Johnson’s attorney, Steven Schlesinger, has been pressing for a full hand count of all 85,000 ballots. He argued that the new optical scan voting machines were faulty and that a hand count could reveal enough missed Johnson ballots to change the outcome.
(And the outcome counts. If Republican Martins holds his lead, and Democratic incumbent Suzi Oppenheimer holds her lead in Westchester, the GOP regains control of the Senate with a 32-30 edge. If Democrat Johnson somehow prevails, it’s 31-31 in the Senate.)
At a previous court session on Tuesday the judge asked attorneys in the case to think about the possibility of hand counting a sample of 20 election districts out of about 270 EDs in the 7th SD.
Martins’ attorney, Peter Bee, has generally opposed a hand count, at least until both Democratic and Republican elections commissioners report their finding on the state mandated audit of 3 percent of the 1,071 machines.
John Ryan, an attorney for the Republican elections commissioner, accused Democrats of raising petty objections during the audit in an attempt to ensure that enough machines failed, which would trigger an expanded audit under state law.
The judge said he would not consider moving toward a sample hand count until he had seen the results of the audit, which should be presented to him at Thursday’s court session.
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