East Meadow incumbents lead as election results pour in

Malfunctions in voting machines cause delays

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As of Wednesday afternoon, East Meadow incumbents were leading their respective electoral races. But thousands of votes still need to be counted as a result of voting machine malfunctions.

According to the Nassau County Board of Elections, State Sen. Kemp Hannon, the Republican incumbent, has collected 52,221 votes, or 52.3 percent of the votes, while Democratic challenger Ryan Cronin has 47,478 votes.

Democratic incumbent Carolyn McCarthy was declared the winner in the 4th Congressional District, as she holds a 60,000 vote lead over Republican challenger, Francis Becker -- 138,561 to 72,673, or 57.4 percent of the vote. Third party challenger Frank Scatturo collected 13,243 on the conservative line. This will be McCarthy's ninth term in congress.

In the state assembly, Republican incumbent Tom McKevitt held 57.3 percent of the votes in the 17th District race. He leads independent challenger Kevin Brady, 24,246 votes to 18,040.

In the 15th Assembly District, Republican incumbent Michael Montesano held 59.7 percent of votes over Democratic challenger Mario Ferone. Montesano has 23,749 votes to Ferone's 15,988.

Incumbent David McDonough, also a Republican, leads the 14th District Assembly race with 27,693 votes, and 62.9 percent of the votes. Challenger John Brooks has 16,309 votes.

But the problems with voting machines in Nassau County could delay the official results of this year’s election for days.

According to William Biamonte, the Democratic commissioner of the county Board of Elections, voting machines in many polling locations were unable to correctly scan ballots or malfunctioned in other ways. As a result, 20,000 emergency ballots were cast — many more than usual.

The unscanned ballots will have to be counted by hand, a process that could take days for each race. Most of the ballots cast were scanned properly by the machines, but the additional paper ballots will slow down the compilation of the final results.

An unusually large number of affidavit ballots will also have to be counted by hand. On Monday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that residents of counties that were declared disaster areas in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy — which include Nassau County — would be allowed to vote in any county in the state by affidavit. But Cuomo’s order, the day before Election Day, left the Board of Elections no time to prepare, and many locations did not have enough affida According to Biamonte, the county has 25,000 to 35,000 affidavit ballots to count.

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