Yesterday’s D&C had an interesting overview about the couple of town & village seats that have been flipped or are close to being flipped (in the case of Parma). The subtitle is:

Election results show cracks developing in GOP strongholds.

The seats that flipped:

Republicans still hold massive enrollment advantages in most of Monroe County’s suburbs, but Democrats have made some inroads: This year in Parma a Democrat came within two votes of unseating a Republican Town Board member; Gates elected its first Democrat to the Town Board since 1979; and two Democrats will be on the Fairport Village Board for the first time in more than 20 years.

But it ain’t over yet for Parma:

In a town where enrolled Republicans outnumber Democrats nearly 2-to-1, Rittler [the Dem] ended up only two votes behind Smith [the GOP incumbent] in the unofficial tally.

Smith filed a lawsuit earlier this week to keep officials from counting five unopened absentee ballots that could swing the election.

The suit goes to court Tuesday. No winner has been declared in the race.

I spoke with the Parma Town Democrats leader, Chad Kyler, on why Smith wants to supress these 5 votes. Apparently the envelopes for these were tossed away and therefore, in Smith’s opinion, unverifiable.

If I recall correctly, the same kind of shenanigans happened at the last Pittsford Village election in 2005. You may remember that as being the first hint of the post- 2004 Democratic resurgance around here, as the results were extremely close. Don’t have a D&C link since the archives are pay-per-view only, but the MCDC site has this quote from Ted Nixon, then Pittsford Dem chair:

“This race was, in one case, decided by one vote and the total difference between the highest vote getter and the lowest was less than 15 votes. We simply need to assure the voters in the Village that the count was done right and all votes were properly counted,” said Nixon. “This is exactly the kind of proactive government our candidates talked to Pittsford voters about during the campaign.”

I also recall at the time there were at least a handfull of absentee ballots that were thrown out because the envelopes had been “lost”.

Who receives and handles these absentee ballots? Is it the town clerk? Because that’s an elected position and as I noted in a previous post, just about all the elected town clerks round these parts are Republicans. [Update:Apparently absentee ballots go directly to the Monroe County BOE, which is (at least on paper) bipartisan.] Not suggesting any malfeasance, but voting is one of the key elements of our democracy, and it disturbs me that something as simple as keeping track of 5 envelopes is not being done. When I see two close races like this and the Pittford village one have a 1 or 2 vote difference, and– whoops!– gee we lost a couple envelopes for these ballots over here, I start seeing the ghost of Ken Blackwell, notorious Ohio Secretary of State who also happened to co-chair Bush’s 2004 Ohio re-election committee. Not like they had any voter suppression issues in Ohio, or anything. Much. Just sayin’.