Buffalo, NY (WBEN) Today is election day, and in the biggest race in the region, it may be unlikely a winner will be declared as Byron Brown seeks re-election in a write-in campaign against India Walton, who upset Brown in June's primary.
Erie County Republican Elections Commissioner Ralph Mohr says there's likely only one scenario where a winner could be declared at the end of the night.
"If India Walton receives more than half of the votes cast of people going to the polls on Election Day, you can pretty much say she's leading, and depending on absentee ballots and other factors, you could declare her the winner," says Mohr.
If not, Mohr says there will be some determination where the race stands.
"We'll know how many votes India Walton received, and we'll know how many potential write-in votes there will be," but Mohr says who got the write-in votes won't be known until the ballots are counted by hand. "In the event the event the write-in votes and potential undervotes exceed the votes Walton gets on the Democratic line, we're just going to have to wait to see what the final results are."
Mohr says absentee ballots can still be counted if they're received until 13 days after the election. "It will also entail going through the number of ballots were cast by people whose names were not in the poll book because either their names changed, they moved and didn't notify the board of elections, and those ballots will count as well," explains Mohr. He says those votes won't be counted until at least 13 days after the election.
Early voting numbers are up since the first year it was enacted, says Mohr. "The first year, which was a local year, we had 26,000 people. We just had under 40,000 cast their ballot by early voting methods," says Mohr, which makes him glad. "What we saw originally in Buffalo was accounting for half of the early votes cast in the first few days, then trickled down as the rest of the county picked up."
Polls are open in Erie County from 6am to 9pm.
