The race will be decided by a count of absentee ballots next week.
View full sizeRepublican candidate for Congress Matt Doheny chats with Bill Fuegel of DeWitt during an appearance at a meeting earlier this month in East Syracuse. Washington -- Matt Doheny’s lead over Doug Hoffman narrowed to 582 votes today in the 23rd Congressional District after the Oneida County Board of Elections reported results from three missing districts.
The two candidates in the Republican primary had been separated by only 612 votes in the 11-county district.
Oneida County had counted only 80 percent of the vote until today, when the missing districts added 207 votes for Hoffman and 177 votes for Doheny.
Oneida County Board of Elections officials did not explain the reason for the missing votes until today.
“There was a problem with missing memory cards,” said Pamela Mandryck, the county’s Republican election commissioner.
Mandryck said election inspectors failed to remove the cards from the machines when polls closed Tuesday. She said the numbers had to be pulled off results tapes when the machines were returned to the county, and entered manually.
“It won’t happen again in the fall,” Mandryck said of the missing memory cards. “That’s because I’m going to send my people out to collect them” directly at polling sites.
In the end, Doheny carried the county with 896 votes to 797 votes for Hoffman. The 23rd includes a small section of Oneida County. Most of the county is in the 24th Congressional District.
The addition of the Oneida County votes means that 100 percent of all precincts have reported in the 23rd District, leaving the race undecided because of the narrow margin. Nothing will be decided until absentee ballots are counted next week.
All counties must be complete a routine recanvassing before reporting their results to the state Board of Elections.
About 4,000 absentee ballots were distributed, according to both campaigns, with about 2,000 ballots returned so far. Any ballot returned by Tuesday will be counted, as long as it was postmarked by Sept. 14.
The Associated Press and other news outlets called the race in favor of Doheny before midnight Tuesday. But both campaigns said the AP made clerical errors in its tabulations that gave Doheny a lead of about 1,700 votes, rather than 612 votes.
Doheny, supplied with the correct numbers, held off on declaring victory and Hoffman has declined to concede.
Contact Washington correspondent Mark Weiner at mweiner@syracuse.com or 571-970-3751.