Thin Margin For McGintee In East Hampton
District 5 mystery: Was that 3 votes or 83?
By Carissa Katz
 Carissa Katz |
(11/08/2007) Although East Hampton Town’s incumbent Democratic supervisor, Bill McGintee, seemed confident of a narrow victory over the Republican challenger, Bill Wilkinson, on election night, unofficial results from the Suffolk County Board of Elections gave Mr. McGintee a paper-thin lead of just eight votes, making the race too close to call.
His Democratic running mates, Julia Prince and Pete Hammerle, on the other hand, made victory look easy. Each sailed away with almost 1,000 votes more than the nearest Republican candidate for town board. Ms. Prince, a first-time candidate and the top vote-getter in her race, had 3,640 votes, according to the unofficial results. Mr. Hammerle had 3,537. On the Republican side, Bill Gardiner had 2,603; Brian Gilbride got 2,283.
In the supervisor’s race, the unofficial results reported by the Board of Elections yesterday showed Mr. McGintee with 3,193 votes and Mr. Wilkinson with 3,185.
“It’s essentially a dead heat at this point,” said Mr. Gardiner, who is also the chairman of the East Hampton Town Republican Committee.
“I think Bill McGintee is ultimately going to be the victor,” Bill Taylor, the co-chairman of the Democratic Committee, said yesterday, adding that “historically Democrats have picked up votes in the absentee ballot process and the recounting.”
Chris Kelley, a Democratic committeeman who was overseeing the Democrats’ vote count on election night, is even more confident that Mr. McGintee will prevail.
Each party had its own poll watchers taking down the numbers as they were tallied at the various polling places. According to Mr. Kelley, a Democratic poll watcher at Election District 5 in East Hampton Village recorded Mr. Wilkinson receiving 3 as opposed to 83 votes on the Working Families Party line in that district. If 83 were the correct number, Mr. Kelley said, that would be the only district in town where a Working Families candidate received votes in the double digits.
There is a marked difference, too, in the total number of votes cast for supervisor in that district versus the total number of votes cast in that district in any other contested two-person race. According to the unofficial results, 347 people voted for supervisor in District 5, while 262 voted for highway superintendent and 273 pulled the lever for town justice.
Mr. Kelley also said that the unofficial Board of Elections results seem not include the absentee ballots in two Amagansett districts. With those ballots, one district would remain in Mr. Wilkinson’s favor and one would tip in Mr. McGintee’s favor, for a net gain of five votes for Mr. Wilkinson.
The Board of Elections would not confirm Mr. Kelley’s assertions.
The numbers the board posted yesterday were to have included 492 absentee ballots that were received in time to be sent to the polls for counting on Tuesday. However, they do not include another 72 absentee ballots received by the board but not counted at the polling places.
An additional 152 absentee ballots were sent to East Hampton voters but had not been received by the Board of Elections as of Election Day.
The outstanding absentee ballots will decide the race for supervisor.
To be valid, absentee ballots were to be postmarked no later than the day before Election Day and must be received by the Board of Elections no later than this coming Tuesday.
“We are cautiously optimistic,” Mr. Taylor said. Nonetheless, the close race was a blow to Democrats, who expected Mr. McGintee, a two-term incumbent, to do very well.
“Going into this thing, the numbers we had for almost every race, except for McGintee’s race, made absolute sense to us,” Mr. Taylor said. “I think what some people were saying about how it would be good to have a Republican on the town board made sense to people, but they didn’t want to vote for Bill Gardiner and they didn’t want to vote for Brian Gilbride.”
Criticisms of Mr. McGintee’s management and record on taxes were cornerstones of the Republican campaign and Mr. Gardiner said yesterday that he thinks those issues resonated with voters in the supervisor race. “I think Democratic voters simply refused to come out for Bill McGintee.”
Of the 19 election districts in East Hampton, Mr. McGintee took 11. Mr. Wilkinson fared best in Election District 10 in Montauk, where he got more than twice the votes of Mr. McGintee. He also appears to have won two of the other three districts in Montauk, one district in Springs, both Amagansett districts, and two East Hampton districts.
In the town board race, the Democrats were “thrilled” about Ms. Prince and Mr. Hammerle’s victories. “I’ve been telling Julia she’s going to be high hook for the last two weeks,” Mr. Taylor said.
Mr. Gardiner blamed his loss and that of Mr. Gilbride on a failure to get their message out. Mr. Gardiner, who ran for the third time, said he is unlikely to run again.
This was a good year for younger candidates in both parties. In the trustee race, Stephanie Talmage and Kayla Talmage, cousins running on the Republican line, were each among the top vote getters. Only Stephen Lester, a Democratic incumbent, earned more votes than they did in a contested race.
Also elected to the nine-member board were Francis Bock, a Democrat and the trustees’ full-time clerk, and John Gosman Jr., another Democratic incumbent. On the Republican line voters also chose the incumbents Norman Edwards Jr., Dianne McNally, and Lynn Mendelman, as well as Tim Bock, a former trustee.
Lisa R. Rana, the Republican town justice, won re-election to a second four-year term, triumphing over Steven Tekulsky, a lawyer and first-time candidate. Justice Rana had 3,213 votes to Mr. Tekulsky’s 2,954.
In the race for town highway superintendent, the Democrat Scott King, who is now deputy superintendent of highways, won his first term, beating Stephen Lynch, 3,166 to 2,798.
The Board of Elections will begin the process of recounting the ballots on Monday, but a final result in the supervisor’s race is not expected until at least the middle of next week.