This year’s election might be in the rearview mirror for most candidates and voters. But staff at the Onondaga County Board of Elections have their work cut out for them as they prepare to hand count more than 90,000 ballots for the county clerk’s race. Democratic challenger Emily Essi expanded her narrow 83 vote lead over incumbent Lisa Dell on election night to more than 300 after all absentees were received and counted. But that’s still within the range required for a manual recount. Republican Elections Commissioner Michele Sardo says they’re getting ready.
"We have to separate the ballots out by district," Sardo said. "If there's a hand recount, everything has to be separated by [election] district and put in bins. We have staff doing that, and we'll continue to do that through Wednesday."
Many voters might recall a similar scenario last year with the very close 50th district state senate race. Democratic Elections Commissioner Dustin Czarny says it makes them better prepared.
"Doing a 91,000 ballot hand count is not something that is brand new to us," Czarny said. "We're going to be following a lot of the guidelines we got from the court last year, as well as lessons we learned last year to get this done. We have a good plan in place."
The manual recount will begin a week from this Tuesday, and continue for 10 days or until all votes are tallied. That means the final result won’t be known until well into December.
Meanwhile, the commissioners are pondering this year’s low turnout, which at barely 30 percent, was even lower than 2021. Michele Sardo says it’s not like the candidates weren’t trying to reach voters.
"I know the candidates were out there, both sides, they were out there trying to get out the vote during early voting, absentees, and also Election Day," Sardo said. "I don't know if it was the races that weren't highly contested that might have turned voters away."
Most county legislature and Syracuse Common Council seats were not contested, which Commissioner Czarny says could influence the outcome of other races.
"Hopefully it's instructive to the parties that they should run more candidates," Czarny said. "Just because it's going to be a low turnout year, you don't know how the electorate is going to react."
Dustin Czarny says the county executive year typically has the lowest turnout in the four-year cycle, despite it being the top elected office in the county. He says a big-ticket race in the city like mayor usually drives more voters to the polls.
