Almost three weeks after election day, the winner of the race for the 22nd Congressional District seat could be announced Monday. A judge in Oswego County has summoned each board of elections from the eight counties in the district to come to court Monday, where the fate of disputed ballots could be decided, according to a report from WBNG-TV.
On election night, former congresswoman and Republican Claudia Tenney had a 28,000 vote lead over incumbent Anthony Brindisi, a Democrat. But thousands of mail-in ballots across the eight-county district were still to be counted. Neither candidate declared victory nor conceded defeat on election night because both knew the mail-in ballots were overwhelmingly from Democrats and likely to vote for the Democratic candidate Brindisi. Still, Tenney’s 28,000-vote lead seemed an insurmountable margin for Brindisi to overcome.
As each county counted absentee and mail-in ballots, the margin narrowed between the two candidates until late last week when Chenango County was the final county to report it’s vote tally. In all, Tenney held the lead but only by a few hundred votes.
That was enough for Tenney to declare victory. “Now that every vote has been counted, we have maintained the vote lead and are poised to come out victorious,” said Tenney. “This process has been long but it is critical that every legal vote be counted and accounted for. Now that it is done, I am confident that I will be certified the winner soon. I look forward to going to Washington to serve the all people of New York’s 22nd District in Congress and want to thank the voters for that privilege. I will always fight for and serve all the people of this district including those that did not support me.”
