As the full hand count of 91,000 paper ballots gets underway in the Queens district attorney Democratic primary, where 16 votes now separate Melinda Katz and Tiffany Cabán, the results of the Watertown mayoral primary 300 miles north remain deadlocked because a county Board of Elections isn’t allowing a hand count of 2,400 cast ballots.
Jefferson County should get its act together and start recounting the votes.
Hand counting is the obvious solution for razor-close contests. It should be written into state law, since scanning machines fail to register votes when voters fail to darken the little ovals, and instead indicate their choices with check marks or circling or underlining.
But the county Board’s Democratic and Republican commissioners are both refusing to examine the ballots, claiming that no court has ever ordered a manual count. Not true. There was a court-approved hand count in 2011 outside Buffalo that flipped the results.
Break the tie. Get out the calculators. Start counting.
![In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1820955015.jpg?w=490 "In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]")
