Unusual doesn't begin to describe Tuesday's election.
There were thousands of absentee ballots and the absence of normalcy because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A primary and a special election for the same congressional seat featured three candidates for one and two for the other, one of whom was on both ballots.
And unlike most elections, many of the votes won't be counted Tuesday night, and won't be tallied for days.
"We’ve never seen anything like this," said Niagara County Democratic Elections Commissioner Lora Allen.
It also was the perfect recipe for confusion, according to some voters at the Orchard Park Municipal Center on South Buffalo Street.
“It wasn’t until this week that I figured out what was going on with the election," said Steve Kennedy, 64, a retired teacher. "I didn’t feel it was explained well enough. I knew that there were at least two candidates for the Republican primary, and all of a sudden Stefan I. Mychajliw Jr. comes out with ads on TV. The Chris Jacobs-Nate McMurray race was not confusing. I guess I didn’t pay attention.”
Richard and Marge Matava, married for 61 years, moved to Orchard Park from Lackawanna about 20 years ago. The Matavas found Tuesday’s ballots confusing. Both Democrats, the Matavas have not voted for a Democrat since the Kennedy administration, when Richard Matava recalled as a young steelworker watching imported steel coils being unloaded at the Small Boat Harbor.
Jackie Klass, 56, had no problem with the ballot, but she could see how some voters could have trouble with it, she said.
“I didn’t like the fact that Cuomo delayed the special election until June," she said of the governor's decision to delay the vote because of the Covid-19 pandemic. "Now, I’ll be interested to see if the vote count will go up a lot because of the mail-in ballots. To me with everything going on, it’s so interesting.”
Richard Mrugalski works in the town’s engineering department, and voted before he visited a job site.
“It is a little confusing, I’ll give you that. You have to think about what you’re trying to do here and everything else. With the primary election and the special election, it should have been separated. They could have done a better job with that, but I’m not exactly sure how.”
The 27th Congressional District election is difficult to compare to other special elections.
At the special election in May 2011, for the then-26th District seat when Kathy Hochul beat Jane Corwin, 44,687 Erie County residents voted. Erie County alone will count more than 100,000 absentee votes for the congressional race between McMurray and Jacobs. In the 2011 race, by comparison, there were 111,597 votes cast in the entire district, according to the Erie County Board of Elections.
High voter turnout in absentee ballots makes the outcome difficult to predict.
Voters returned an usually high number of absentee ballots, and elections commissioners in some of the 27th Congressional District's eight counties said early voting was light. But more voters than expected went to the polls Tuesday.
Republican Erie County Elections Commissioner Ralph Mohr said he was surprised at how many voters still showed up to vote on Election Day in the 27th Congressional District.
“It was certainly higher than I anticipated,” Mohr said, in light of the fact that so many voters had requested absentee ballots.
Mohr said when he was out in Elma earlier in the day, 118 Republicans and 38 Democrats had voted in person. However, more Democrats than Republicans had requested and returned absentee ballots in that district.
Elections inspectors at Eden Central Middle and High School said about 260 had voted in the special election by 7 p.m. All but one voter wore a mask, they said.
"Quite a few people came in the pouring rain," said poll worker Nancy Putney. "It was raining cats and dogs, and people appeared."
The attention paid to the congressional race and GOP primary may have helped boost turnout outside the district, according to Erie County Democratic Elections Commissioner Jeremy J. Zellner. And the ease of obtaining absentee ballots increased turnout.
"I think it goes to show you that if you remove barriers to people, to their ability to vote, if you remove those barriers, they're going to vote," Zellner said. "We need to try and remove those barriers so more people come out and take advantage of voting."
News Staff Reporter Sandra Tan contributed to this report.
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