Ballots Yet to Be Tallied
Eight days after Democratic Party voters went to the polls to nominate a candidate to represent New York’s First Congressional District in the House of Representatives, the contest between Anna Throne-Holst and Dave Calone was still undecided, with almost 2,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted. The eventual winner will face Lee Zeldin, a Republican in his first re-election campaign.
At its deadline on Tuesday, the Suffolk County Board of Elections had received a total of 1,994 absentee ballots. When machine votes were counted on the night of June 28, Ms. Throne-Holst, a former Southampton Town supervisor, held just a 29-vote lead over Mr. Calone, a businessman, former federal prosecutor, and former chairman of the Suffolk County Planning Commission. Ms. Throne-Holst had 5,446 votes to Mr. Calone’s 5,417.
New York State election law requires an audit of 3 percent of randomly selected voting machines to ensure the accuracy of the tally. The random selection was still in progress on Tuesday, according to a representative of the Board of Elections. The opening of absentee ballots is tentatively scheduled for this morning, the representative said.
The primary race was expensive, with some $3 million spent by the two campaigns. Despite that expenditure, turnout at the polls was around 9 percent of the district’s 137,695 registered Democrats.
“I’m proud to be in the lead after election night, and am most especially proud of the positive campaign we ran,” Ms. Throne-Holst said in a statement issued on June 29. The statement went on to complain about “dishonest negative ads” aired by Mr. Calone’s campaign, but said that her lead was due to voters’ trust in her record of “fighting for Suffolk County families and cleaning up the financial mess in Southampton, while turning the town around, and protecting our environment.”
In a statement issued on the same day, Mr. Calone called the present tally “a victory of the volunteer grassroots.” He referred to his opponent’s “Wall Street fund-raisers” and political action committee money used against him in the campaign’s closing weeks, “but here we are in a virtual tie.”
Both candidates’ statements addressed the eventual winner’s upcoming campaign against Mr. Zeldin. Mr. Calone called Mr. Zeldin “a proud defender of Donald Trump who voted to defund Planned Parenthood and voted against prohibiting people on the terrorist watch list from buying guns,” while Ms. Throne-Holst said that voters “will reject not only his extremist views and votes, but also his enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump, who is dangerous for both Long Island and the country.”
New York’s First District includes eastern and most of central Suffolk County, including East Hampton, Southampton, Shelter Island, Southold, Riverhead, Brookhaven, and most of Smithtown.