You may be right. It’s been a while since I actually checked the legalities of it, however, in many municipalities absentee ballots are only counted if the election may be affected. If you’ll recall that’s one reason there was such attention to the absentee ballots in Florida in 2000. As it’s the weekend, I can’t exactly call up the Board of Elections, but I will follow up tomorrow morning.
Have you seen this?
Here’s 9.102 (3)(c) of New York election law, dealing with counting ballots, and it says that, after the machine ballots and paper ballots are counted:
http://www.elections.state.ny.us/download/law/elaw2002.pdf
It doesn’t say anything there, at least, about absentee ballots being conditional. Of course, by the time the absentee ballots are counted, there’s usually no doubt who won the election, and if there are only 100 absentee ballots, for example, and one candidate is winning by 200 votes before their counted, those ballots aren’t going to change the ultimate results. This isn’t because they’re absentee ballots, but just because they’re some of the last to be counted, and each absentee vote counts as much as a vote made in person.
The reason the absentee ballots in Florida had gotten so much attention was just because the election was so close. Some of the early results showed Gore winning in vote tallies, and, since most of the absentee ballots were from servicemembers, and since the military tends to vote Republican, there was a chance that those ballots could have given Bush enough votes to win.
Are you sure you didn’t misunderstand what the BOE guy said to you? He might have just meant that they knew the winner before the absentee votes were counted, and therefore they didn’t need to count the absentee votes to know who won. (but they did count them)
Looks good, I tried to follow the link, but my computer balked at a 500 page pdf document, so I’ll take your word for it. 
What I do find important about your link is that it’s the new, revised election code, as of 2002. I’d wanted to see if they mentioned things that had been changed from previous codes.
I never said that there weren’t other reasons for the attention to absentee ballots. Just meant that was one reason the ‘those poor voters couldn’t understand a butterfly ballot’ folks were so determined to throw out any military absentee ballot that didn’t have every i dotted and t crossed to perfection, because ‘if they’re too stupid to fill out an absentee ballot, they’re too stupid to vote.’ (Yes, that second IS a direct quote. And yes, the woman who said it was simultaneously arguing that the butterfly ballot was too hard for people to use.) You can imagine what that whole mess did for my faith in the Democrats.
It is possible. I think it’s unlikely 'cause I tend to remember things that piss me off, but you may be right.
Both parties support every vote being counted, in the abstact. That just doesn’t always apply to specific cases…
And if it was lowered to green or blue, then another conspiracy (inviting terrorist acts to take place during the convention by reducing security) would take its place… or hey, let’s just leave it at yellow and not change it all and act like nothing around us is changing…damned if you do damned it you don’t. Let’s just ignore the whole damn thing. :rolleyes:
EXACTLY!
PARTY! PARTY! So long as Kerry & Co stay away from altar boys, they have a lock.
Really, they should take one idea from Cris Rock’s Prez movie – highly trained, loyal “super-whores”, to be there if the boys can’t keep their pants zipped. 
New poll results on cnn.com show Kerry inching ahead, though still within the margin of error.
But there’s one intriguing angle:
Is it possible? That Nader could siphon off more votes from Bush than from Kerry? What an ironic twist, if true, eh?