Chenango County election officials find 55 lost and unopened ballots
FILE - On Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020, Chenango County informed a state judge it had discovered 55 early voting ballots that weren’t canvassed by the local board of election, and therefore weren’t included in the vote totals in the ultra-tight race between Anthony Brindisi and Republican challenger, former U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney. The most recent results — which don’t include those ballots — showed Tenney with a 12-vote lead over Brindisi. (AP Photo/Heather Ainsworth, File)
CHENANGO COUNTY – On Tuesday Chenango County election officials were conducting a routine check when they discovered 55 ballots that had not been counted during the election.
Republican Party Commissioner Mary Lou Monahan said the ballots were found in secure drawers, where they were supposed to be kept during the election. She said a portion of the ballots from the first nine days of early voting had been missed and left behind in the drawers by mistake.
“I want to assure voters the integrity in that office is not compromised in any way, shape or form,” she said Thursday.
“We were going through registrations from the poll sites, and one of the early voting drawers- we have 31 drawers for the districts and and we have nine drawers for the days of early voting,” said Monahan. That is when officials found the 55 ballots in the locked early voting drawers.
Compounding the error, the discovery comes in the middle of a closely contested election in the 22nd Congressional District, where about a dozen votes out of more than 300,000 ballots separate the two main candidates: Claudia Tenney, the district's former congresswoman and a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and the current incumbent, Congressman Anthony Brindisi, a moderate Democrat.
Chenango County Attorney Alan Gordon said he was notified Tuesday and immediately told election officials to secure the ballots as he informed the presiding judge, Oswego County Judge Scott J. DelConte, about the situation and asked what they should to do.
“I got a call from the board of elections saying they had found 55 early voting ballots that had been put aside and forgot about. Early voting I believe, with affidavit ballots to check later and they had forgot about them,” he said.
“As soon as they informed me I sent a letter to the judge asking 'What should we do?' 'How do we open the sealed ballots?'”
“It's important for people to know that these 55 ballots are among 2,000 others with objections on them before the court,” Gordon explained.
He said the approximate 2,000 other ballots represented all those challenged in the election between Brindisi and Tenney from the entire congressional district and all the other counties.
The lapse also exposed that the board of elections had been impacted by the recent cyber attack on Chenango County computers in October, right before the election. The county is still recovering from the attack that took half the computers and almost all official emails offline.
The county elections office also lost access to electronic voter data bases for a number of days, which are used for the verification process and how the office gets some information from New York State and the DMV.
“There were so many election law changes and demands made and we met those. When you add in a virus and older poll workers who don't want to work during a pandemic and new ones needing to be trained- the voter management system was lost. We did the very best job we could do,” said Monahan.
She said leadership in the office accepted the ultimate responsibility and would do everything to make sure the votes are counted as they should have been.
Election officials said the missed ballots all included votes received from the first nine days of early voting and each included a sealed envelope with an affidavit on the outside.
The votes were then processed as normal by Democratic Party Commissioner Carol Franklin and Monahan, who reviewed the paperwork on the outside of the sealed ballots and determined only 44 of them came from registered voters. They then sent copies of the paperwork, not the ballots, to both campaigns for independent review.
Both campaigns had representatives monitoring the vote counts during the election.
The remaining 44 eligible ballots are still unopened and uncounted as of Thursday said Monahan and stored in a secure location at the Chenango County Office building. She said they will only be opened and counted under the discretion of a judge.
“We will have new workflows to ensure this never happens again,” said Monahan. She said the mistake was made “in the throes of a ransomware attack, which hogtied us from what we normally do.”
On top of that early voting numbers shattered previous local records. Election results indicated nearly six times as many people in the county voted early this year than in any other previous year, over 3,000.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said all the found ballots had been misplaced from the first day of early voting. Election officials clarified Thursday afternoon, after print, that some of the 55 found ballots came from different early voting days, not just one.
Republican Party Commissioner Mary Lou Monahan said the ballots were found in secure drawers, where they were supposed to be kept during the election. She said a portion of the ballots from the first nine days of early voting had been missed and left behind in the drawers by mistake.
“I want to assure voters the integrity in that office is not compromised in any way, shape or form,” she said Thursday.
“We were going through registrations from the poll sites, and one of the early voting drawers- we have 31 drawers for the districts and and we have nine drawers for the days of early voting,” said Monahan. That is when officials found the 55 ballots in the locked early voting drawers.
Compounding the error, the discovery comes in the middle of a closely contested election in the 22nd Congressional District, where about a dozen votes out of more than 300,000 ballots separate the two main candidates: Claudia Tenney, the district's former congresswoman and a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump and the current incumbent, Congressman Anthony Brindisi, a moderate Democrat.
Chenango County Attorney Alan Gordon said he was notified Tuesday and immediately told election officials to secure the ballots as he informed the presiding judge, Oswego County Judge Scott J. DelConte, about the situation and asked what they should to do.
“I got a call from the board of elections saying they had found 55 early voting ballots that had been put aside and forgot about. Early voting I believe, with affidavit ballots to check later and they had forgot about them,” he said.
“As soon as they informed me I sent a letter to the judge asking 'What should we do?' 'How do we open the sealed ballots?'”
“It's important for people to know that these 55 ballots are among 2,000 others with objections on them before the court,” Gordon explained.
He said the approximate 2,000 other ballots represented all those challenged in the election between Brindisi and Tenney from the entire congressional district and all the other counties.
The lapse also exposed that the board of elections had been impacted by the recent cyber attack on Chenango County computers in October, right before the election. The county is still recovering from the attack that took half the computers and almost all official emails offline.
The county elections office also lost access to electronic voter data bases for a number of days, which are used for the verification process and how the office gets some information from New York State and the DMV.
“There were so many election law changes and demands made and we met those. When you add in a virus and older poll workers who don't want to work during a pandemic and new ones needing to be trained- the voter management system was lost. We did the very best job we could do,” said Monahan.
She said leadership in the office accepted the ultimate responsibility and would do everything to make sure the votes are counted as they should have been.
Election officials said the missed ballots all included votes received from the first nine days of early voting and each included a sealed envelope with an affidavit on the outside.
The votes were then processed as normal by Democratic Party Commissioner Carol Franklin and Monahan, who reviewed the paperwork on the outside of the sealed ballots and determined only 44 of them came from registered voters. They then sent copies of the paperwork, not the ballots, to both campaigns for independent review.
Both campaigns had representatives monitoring the vote counts during the election.
The remaining 44 eligible ballots are still unopened and uncounted as of Thursday said Monahan and stored in a secure location at the Chenango County Office building. She said they will only be opened and counted under the discretion of a judge.
“We will have new workflows to ensure this never happens again,” said Monahan. She said the mistake was made “in the throes of a ransomware attack, which hogtied us from what we normally do.”
On top of that early voting numbers shattered previous local records. Election results indicated nearly six times as many people in the county voted early this year than in any other previous year, over 3,000.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story said all the found ballots had been misplaced from the first day of early voting. Election officials clarified Thursday afternoon, after print, that some of the 55 found ballots came from different early voting days, not just one.
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