ORCHARD PARK
Supervisor race remains undecided in Orchard Park
The winner of the Orchard Park town supervisor’s race will not be known for at least a week.
The most complete results available at the end of Wednesday showed Town Clerk Janis A. Colarusso leading retired dentist Patrick J. Keem by 109 votes— but more than 170 absentee ballots have yet to be counted, officials said.
“In a best-case scenario, we would probably have a final count at the end of next week,” said Elections Commissioner Dennis E. Ward.
The candidates are not looking forward to the wait. Colarusso said she is “a little nervous,” and Keem said he is in the “unwind mode” from the daily campaign.
“To quote Yogi Berra, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over,’ until every vote is counted,” he said. “I was an unknown in Orchard Park until five months ago.”
“I think he ran a great campaign,” Colarusso said. “It tells you one thing, if you put your heart and soul into something you can get it.”
With nearly 6,000 votes tallied from all 25 election districts, Colarusso has 2,982, or 51 percent of the vote, to Keem’s 2,873, or 49 percent. There had been one election district outstanding until Wednesday afternoon.
Ward said the problem was not from any problem with the new voting machines — just that the votes weren’t submitted to the board Tuesday night.
At the end of the night, once the machines tally the votes, he said, an election worker must phone in the results to the Board of Elections,
“The practical problem is that the inspectors have worked a 16-hour day, it’s now 9:45, and they want to get home. They call once, they call twice, then, if they can’t get through, they pack up and go home,” Ward said.
Absentee and military ballots will be arriving through early next week, so the final overall count will take at least a week.
Depending on how close the vote is, elections commissioners could deem it necessary to hand-count all the ballots.
“We will have to make the determination: Is it close enough to wade in, roll up our sleeves and do a hand count?” Ward said.
Eventually, the state will provide guidelines on how narrow a margin of victory will automatically trigger a hand recount. Until then, though, it will be left up to county election officials to decide, he said.
News Staff Reporter Barbara O’Brien contributed to this report. mpasciak@buffnews.com
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