SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Absentee ballots for the Syracuse Democratic mayoral primary race will be counted on Tuesday, June 29. There are currently 558 absentee ballots that will need to be counted.
As of Wednesday, common councilors Khalid Bey and Michael Greene are nearly deadlocked. Bey maintains a 46-vote lead over Greene. Bey received 2,720 votes (49.85%) compared to Greene’s 2,674 (49.01%).
“This is one of the closest mayoral primary races I’ve seen in quite some time,” Dustin Czarny, commissioner of the Onondaga County Board of Elections, said.
Caitlyn Libby, Greene’s campaign manager, said she was pleased with how Tuesday went.
“With the margins being this close, it just means that we’ve made the connections that we were supposed to to drop the margins,” Libby said. “And that people are listening and like his vision and we’re confident.”
This lead is within the margin for absentee ballots to play a role. According to Czarny, absentee ballots were mailed out to over 1,200 Democratic voters in Syracuse. Slightly more than 550 ballots have been returned. Any ballot postmarked by Tuesday, June 22 must be received by the Onondaga County Board of Elections by Tuesday, June 29 to count.
Czarny said that the process leading up to counting absentee ballots can be drawn out.
“We have to do a ton of audits, between now and the 29th,” Czarny said. “We have to wait for the absentees to come in. And then we have to, you know, do a statewide recanvassing to make sure they didn’t vote in other counties. So there’s a lot of preparation that goes into before we can even open up a ballot.”
Libby said her team believes Greene needs to win at least 55% of the absentee vote to make up his deficit.
“What we have figured out is that [Greene] needs about 55% of that vote,” Libby said. “And if you saw the early voting numbers in person, early voting numbers had ahead by three or four percent. We tend to see that absentee and early voters are the most engaged. So if that trend continues, I can see it going in our way.”
Czarny said once the counting begins on June 29, the results will come quickly.
“After doing 60,000 last year, we’re pretty good at it,” Czarny said.
However, the process could become even more drawn out if the official results declare a winner by either 20 votes or less or less than 0.5% of the vote. If either of these situations occurs after counting the absentee ballots, it will trigger an automatic hand recount.
If this happens, Czarny said it will be all hands on deck.
“We’re going to need people,” Czarny said. “And we’ll go election district by election district, count the votes in that race, and compare it to the unofficial results, and the absent team results that we have from that race.”
Libby continued to express confidence in Greene’s campaign team’s plan, even if it went to a recount.
“We always have a strategy and a plan in place,” Libby said. “This is something that we anticipated from the beginning. It’s something where you’re constantly in communication with your staff and your supporters and letting them know that this may happen, and that we need to ignite them as soon as it does, because it’s all hands on deck.”
Bey’s campaign team did not respond to a request for a statement as of this writing.
