Another Dispute in New York’s U.S. Congressional District 22
You still haven’t heard the last about the 22nd U.S. Congressional District race in New York that dragged on three months after election day.
Now, the U.S. Department of Justice has notified Oneida County that the Federal government plans to sue over violations it says disenfranchised voters if a settlement can’t be reached.
Congresswoman Claudia Tenney won back her seat from Democrat Congressman Anthony Brindisi by 109 votes after problems were found in the count in the district that includes Broome, Chenango, Oneida and five other counties.
Some of the problems involved misplaced votes that were discovered in Chenango County twice during the canvassing, sticky notes on ballots that were in question that fell off on the way to court and, at issue in the threatened suit in Oneida County, a number of registrations that had been filed before the deadline through the Department of Motor Vehicles that had not been processed by the Board of Elections in that county on-time as well as improperly rejected affidavit ballots.
The contest between Republican Tenney and the incumbent, Brindisi, dragged on until early February with the lead barely switching to Brindisi once in the counting and re-counting. Brindisi had defeated Tenney two years prior in another tight race, but that time the lead was a couple thousand instead of less than two-hundred votes.