The Erie County Board of Elections dismissed a team of poll workers Tuesday after receiving an allegation of a ballot that was prestamped for Mayor Byron W. Brown on Buffalo's West Side.
And while the Erie County District Attorney's Office is investigating the matter, a county elections commissioner and both the Brown and India Walton campaigns say there is no evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities in the hotly contested race.
Election officials will not begin examining the actual write-in votes until Nov. 16 when all absentee and military ballots are returned to the Board of Elections.
“This was the only situation that we’ve heard of this occurring," said Ralph M. Mohr, Republican elections commissioner. "We heard about it, took action immediately on it. It doesn’t appear to be any type of widespread situation, even at that location.”
The board was alerted by a 36-year-old West Side voter named Allison. She spoke to The News on the condition that her last name be withheld because she has small children and did not wish to get involved in the controversy of a divisive mayoral race.
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Allison said an elections inspector handed her a ballot that was already stamped with Brown’s name on it, though it was not stamped in the proper box for write-in votes.
In the aftermath of Brown's apparent write-in victory, questions surround whether Buffalo was ever ready to follow the progressive path India Walton's primary victory seemed to have charted.
“I took it back up to the table and said, ‘Hey, I noticed, like, did somebody stamp these?’ And she’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I went through and stamped them all,’ ” she said.
Mohr confirmed that the elections inspector admitted to stamping the ballot with the mayor's name.
“One of the inspectors who also serves as an interpreter admitted stamping the ballot of at least one voter – we don’t know how many – at the check-in table," Mohr said.
Allison, who is a Walton supporter, said it appeared the election inspector might have made a mistake. She said she perceived no ill-intent from the woman.
“It didn’t strike me as anything covert or malicious," she said. "She was very open about it. I got the sense that she did what she thought she was supposed to do.”
"The people chose four more years of the Brown administration," Brown said in his speech. "The people chose one of the greatest comeback stories in our history."
The total number of prestamped ballots given to voters could not be higher than 50, Mohr said. That's how many ballots had been cast at that polling site when the Board of Elections was alerted to the problem.
Still, Mohr said elections inspectors at the Belle Center on Maryland Street erred in allowing stamps created for Brown's write-in campaign to be placed at the check-in tables of the polling place.
Brown supporters handed out stamps to make it easier to vote for the four-term mayor after Walton defeated him in the Democratic primary. Legally, volunteers could only hand out those stamps at least 100 feet away from polling sites. Election workers inside that zone can assist voters, but are forbidden from politicking for candidates.
Board of elections officials "immediately took action,” dismissed the inspector in question and replaced all four inspectors with board personnel, who conducted the rest of the election. They then turned over the investigation to the Erie County district attorney.
“Our office was contacted by the Board of Elections to investigate an allegation that poll workers may have misused a stamp at one polling location yesterday," District Attorney John J. Flynn Jr. said Wednesday in a statement. "We cannot comment further while the matter remains under investigation.”
The city's most conservative areas – South Buffalo, Lovejoy and the North District – voted overwhelmingly to make Byron Brown the city's first five-term mayor and its first write-in mayor.
In a statement Wednesday in which she all but conceded after losing by an apparent 18 percentage points to Brown, Walton lamented that “every dirty trick was used against us.” The statement also referred to “Republican poll inspectors prestamping ballots.”
But spokespeople for both her campaign and Brown's said Thursday that they were not aware of any widespread election irregularities. In the unofficial vote totals, Walton received 10,287 fewer votes than the write-in candidates. Most of those votes are likely to be awarded to Brown after a final count.
In a photo of the ballot Allison posted on Twitter, Brown’s name was stamped to the right of Walton's, whose name was the only one that appeared in the mayoral column by virtue of her primary victory. But Brown’s name was not stamped in the proper box on the bottom right corner of the ballot, where his supporters were instructed to cast their write-in votes.
The Belle Center polling place is a part of the Ellicott District. Walton is leading in the district's unofficial vote tally by 183 votes. In the primary, she won the district by 197 votes.
While she sports a Walton campaign sign on her lawn, Allison said she reported the incident not for partisan reasons, but because she wanted to ensure a fair election.
“I just wanted people’s vote to count accurately in the way that it was intended," she said. "I didn’t want a Byron vote to be thrown out for no fault of their own. I didn’t want a Walton vote to be thrown out for no fault of their own. I wanted the race to be won accurately, whichever way it went.”
Despite the mix-up, Mohr said voters should have confidence in the fairness of the election system.
"On Election Day and these two days after, we haven’t heard of any other instance in which an irregularity like this occurred,” he said.
