With Absentee Ballots Breaking In His Favor, Murphy Has Pulled Ahead In NY-20 Congressional Race

Democrat Scott Murphy's up by 46 votes now, after 1,400 of the 6,700 absentee ballots have been counted. The Republican Party obstructionists aren't going to let a simple thing like a majority of votes stop them though. Bringing in their top election thief, they're looking to try to disenfranchise as many Democratic voters as they can. The Albany Project is covering this in minute detail.

At this point, the absentees appear to be breaking significantly for Murphy. Tedisco leads by 68 votes among ballots cast on Election Day, while Murphy leads by 114 votes in the much smaller pool of absentees.

But the totals so far do not include Saratoga County-- a Tedisco stronghold that comprises more votes than any other county in the 20th congressional district. A Saratoga County official has told the Albany Times-Union that it will not report any results until its count is finished, leaving a key Tedisco-leaning county out of the early numbers.

Tedisco’s campaign said late Thursday that the totals from Saratoga County, which have not yet been added to the state Board of Elections website’s count, would have pushed the race in Tedisco’s favor by 60 votes, but that was before three Murphy-favoring counties reported more totals Friday morning.

Fired by Assembly Republicans from his leadership post, Tedisco is now more desperate than ever to grab the congressional seat. The fact that there are 70,000 more registered Republicans in the district than Democrats is making them all a little nervous. Daily Kos has a great report on how Tedisco's team is going about trying to steal the election.

[V]irtually all ballots from Democrats who fit the profile of "second home owners" are being challenged-- and if the Board does not uphold the challenge, those ballots are being set aside, unopened, subject to a formal appeal by Tedisco. That is: They cannot be opened until a judge rules on them.

This GOP strategy is going to significantly depress Murphy's vote tally in Columbia, at least temporarily.

Those unfamiliar with Columbia County may not be aware that there has been, for many years, a large second home community here-- made up overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, of Democrats from New York City. Many of these voters have been here for many years, in some cases decades. As is entirely appropriate and legal, they have cast their ballots here without incident many times before, including just a few months ago for Barack Obama.

But as I'm hearing it, the Tedisco lawyer in Columbia (sent in by John Ciampoli) came prepared to challenge pretty much anyone who was a Democrat who had their absentee sent to a "downstate" address.

UPDATE: Michael Steele Has Been Wrong On More Than Just Poor Befuddled Jim Tedisco

Just as Michael Steele was trying to persuade George Stephanopouls that he isn't a crook and convince Bill Bennett's hate talk radio audience that there is no recession which can be clearly seen by how busy the malls are ("The malls are just as packed on Saturday"), CNNMoney released a report that would embarrass Steele... if he were embarrassable.

Strip malls, neighborhood centers and regional malls are losing stores at the fastest pace in at least a decade, as a spending slump forces retailers to trim down to stay afloat, according to a real estate industry report.

The consequence for consumers: Fewer stores to shop and less product choice.

In just the first quarter of 2009, retail tenants at these centers have vacated 8.7 million square feet of commercial space, according to the latest report from New York-based real estate research firm Reis.

That number exceeds the 8.6 million square feet of retail space that was vacated in all of 2008.

Reis' report shows that store vacancy rates at malls rose 9.5% in the first quarter, outpacing the 8.9% vacancy rate registered in all of 2008, and marking the largest single-quarter jump in vacancies since Reis began publishing quarterly figures in 1999.

"These record numbers are symptomatic of the pervasive weakness that we're seeing across economic sectors," said Victor Calanog, director of research with Reis.

"Consumers are worried about their asset bases and they aren't buying things," he said. "Their home values and retirement accounts are still reeling, and consumers remain concerned about future income as job losses accelerate."

And the report goes on the predict that it will get much worse, with mall vacancies headed for historic highs until stabilization starts in 2012, after Obama has been able to dilute the catastrophic impact of decades of ideologically greed-driven Republican economic policies.


THE NY-20 RACE: TWO ADDITIONAL NOTES FROM KEN

(1) About those NYC absentee voters

The GOP singling out of possible "second home" voter registrants is more sinister than the Albany Project writer quoted here suggests, as has been reported earlier on The Albany Project. There is no question that someone with more than one residence is legally entitled to vote from any legitimate address. What the election-stealers are targeting, the theory goes, is something more particular: NYC residents who may have rent-controlled or rent-stabilized apartments in the city. While it's just possible that it's somehow kosher for them to vote from their upstate address, in NYC it is pretty much an absolute requirement that a rent-regulated apartment be the tenant's primary residence. At the least, this is called into question if the tenant votes from another address.

The idea appears to be intimidation. Remember, those ballots are being segregated before opening. Speculation is that the intent is to encourage absentee voters who have NYC addresses (who may be presumed to be dangerously likely to be Democratic voters). whose rent-regulated status might be jeopardized, to try to withdraw their ballots before they're counted.

(2) About Jim Tedisco

I've written a number of times here about the extremely peculiar and dysfunctional structure of New York State government which has been essentially permanent over the last 40-plus years, in which, by common consent of the two major parties, control of the State Senate was conceded to the Republicans and the Assembly to the Democrats, with most of the real legislative power lodged in the hands of the two legislative leaders, the Senate majority leader (R) and the Assembly speaker (D). The two of them have been, along with the governor, the famous "three men in a room" who have pretty much been the state government over this period. (It's only recently, with the implosion of the state GOP, that the Republicans' grip on the Senate faltered and finally, in the 2008 election, was lost.)

The thing is, since the two legislative leaders barely tolerate input from members of their own caucus, the minority parties -- the Senate Democrats and Assembly Republicans -- have had almost literally no function during this time, and except on rare occasions can barely be said to have risen to the stature of an "opposition" party. They have been mostly reduced to the status of obstructionists (with hardly any power to obstruct anything, except on occasional special issues) or outright clowns. Now that the Democrats have taken control of the Senate, we're seeing a gruesome demonstration of what happens when a caucus with a heavy concentration of such time-servers takes on the responsibility of governing. It has been a woeful spectacle.

And the Senate Democrats were a class act by comparison with the equally useless Assembly Republicans, who tend to be the intellectual and ethical equivalent of used-car salesmen. And who is Jim Tedisco? The leader of the Assembly Republicans -- or in fact, as Howie points out above, the former leader, the caucus having declared its intent to replace him with someone even creepier from among its ranks. (And if you're looking for creepy, trust me, the NYS Assembly Republican caucus is a jim-dandy place to find it.) It may sound impressive to refer to the candidate as Assembly Minority Leader Jim Tedisco, but in real-world terms what it breaks down to is someone who has at best put in his time in the Assembly watching government happen around him, and who in the end proved too clueless even for that cadre of clowns.

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