The race is not over, but if Village of Pelham Manor mayor Jennifer Monachino Lapey and trustee Tim Case maintain their slim leads and win re-election, it will be because their strategy of getting every last vote from absentee ballots outperformed the Democrats’ drive to get their voters to the polls early and on election day.

As of late Monday–a day on which both candidates added 22 votes to their totals–Republican incumbent Lapey continues to hold a 20-vote lead over Democratic challenger Mark Cardwell. Case, also a Republican, is clinging to a 2-vote edge over Democratic challenger Ryan Kurtz for one of two trustee seats up for grabs. Democrat Deborah Winstead holds an 11-vote lead over Case in the trustee race, while Republican incumbent DJ McLaughlin, last of the four candidates, trails Kurtz by 31 votes.

All of these races are too close to call because a total of 63 absentee ballots have not been returned out of 318 issued, according to the Westchester County Board of Elections The board will accept ballots that were mailed by election day and arrive by the end of Wednesday, November 12.

But even before the total number of votes are known, it’s possible to quantify the success of the Manor incumbents’ strategy.  On election day, Lapey and Cardwell received almost the same number of votes from voters who went to the gym at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church to fill out their ballots and slide them into the voting machines. Lapey tallied 917 votes to Cardwell’s 915 in the gym that day.

The Democrats emphasized a variety of voting options, including early voting,  a strategy that yielded gains for them. According to the county board, Cardwell won 216 votes on ballots that were cast in person before election day to 123 for Lapey, a difference of 93 out of 339 early votes cast. The numbers between Kurtz and Winstead against Case and McLaughlin followed the same pattern, with the former outperforming the latter by more than 90 votes each.

But in votes that are classified as “absentee” or “mail-in” ballots, the Republicans so far have beaten the Democrats by a wider margin. In this category, Lapey has bested Cardwell by a margin of 111 votes, 198 to 87, a larger difference than the one provided by the early voting margins for the Democrats. Case and McLaughlin benefited from comparable gains in this category.

The Republican incumbents’ advantage owes much to their own hustle. According to information compiled by the county, at least 11 individuals associated with the Manor leadership–including Board of Trustees members Case and Breda Bennett–picked up a total of more than 50 absentee ballots on behalf of absentee voters. None of these individuals, including the two trustees, gathered more than five absentee ballots, the limit imposed by Westchester County.

This practice, sometimes referred to as ballot “harvesting,” has developed a negative connotation over the years because it has occasionally been abused by individuals who engaged in the practice on a massive scale with little oversight, threatening the integrity of elections.

Two years ago, following a narrow loss in his bid to join the Board of Trustees in the Manor, candidate Mark Cardwell emailed New York governor Kathy Hochul and then-Westchester County executive George Latimer, alleging that there were a series of irregularities in that election, which was overseen by the Manor.

One of those irregularities, he alleged, was that “hundreds of … absentee ballots were distributed and collected by just a couple of  individuals, one with deep ties to the local Republican Party and another the spouse of a trustee.  While ‘mass harvesting’ is not necessarily illegal in New York, it is in direct contradiction to our  county policies which wisely limit any single individual to just five ballots a day.” Cardwell’s complaint, and a subsequent investigation by the Westchester District Attorney’s office, did not lead to any findings that altered the result.

In contrast to the practices alleged then, the process as practiced by supporters of the Manor Republicans this year conforms to voting rules enforced by the county, as individuals and their relatives and supporters are authorized to pick up as many as five absentee ballots each.

Allison Frost, chair of PelhamNY Democrats, said the local party’s strategy was to inform voters of the variety of options they had, not just early voting, but voting by mail and by absentee ballot. “We presented every voter with all the ways they could vote,” she said. “We’re all for voter empowerment and providing the opportunity for people to vote as easily as possible.”

Asked via email about the success so far of the harvesting strategy, Case declined to comment, given that the election result has not yet been determined. Bennett did not respond to a similar request for comment.

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