BUFFALO (WBEN) - This week, the Erie County Board of Elections will begin the process of counting thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots from the November 2 Election so they can officially certify the results.
Of course, this process is exacerbated this year due to the large number of write-ins cast in the Buffalo mayor's race between Byron Brown and India Walton, even though it's presumed the Brown won re-election.
According to Republican Board of Elections Commissioner Ralph Mohr, the candidates and their representatives will have the ability to review all of the absentee and mail-in ballots the board has received but has not yet counted toward the general election tally on Monday.
On Tuesday, the Board of Elections will start inspecting thousands of ballots so they can officially certify the various races district by district, and Mohr expects that process to be completed either Tuesday or early Wednesday.
"The procedure that the Board of Elections is going to to utilize is the same procedure that we published prior to the election, distributed to the candidates, and also utilized in the past," said Mohr. "It's a very transparent process - it's open to the public; it's open to the candidates and the campaigns and their representatives.
"It will not be a difficult process, it will just be a time consuming process," he continued. "The volume of ballots that we have to visually inspect will be more than any time we've had in the past recent memory. We've had write-in races before in other races, but we've never had tens of thousands of ballots to go through."
No Erie County candidate has raised any challenges to this point, and the deadline for any campaign to challenge or make objections is Monday at 5 p.m.
