Still no winner in Oceanside's 2018 Sanitation No. 7 race

Nearly a week has passed and no winner has been announced in the 2018 Oceanside Sanitation District No. 7 board of commissioners race. Polls closed on June 21. Candidates Austin Graff and Joe Cibellis are vying for the open seat of Commissioner Ed Scharfberg, who did not seek reelection.

The official tally from election night was 536 electronic votes for Graff, and 469 for Cibellis with 187 uncounted written affidavit ballots for residents who were not on sanitation voter rolls.

Bonnie Garone, an assistant counsel at the Nassau County Board of Elections, said that sanitation officials had contacted the board on Tuesday requesting it cross-reference the affidavits with its own voter rolls.

“That’s all we can do,” Garone said of the board’s responsibility in special district elections such as Sanitation District No. 7’s. “We don’t make the determination whether the ballot is valid and open to be counted. They can send their information to us, and we will see where that person is registered in our system.”

She added that it would be up to sanitation officials to determine whether a voter falls within the district’s jurisdiction.

A sanitation employee, who declined to give her name, directed all questions regarding the election to Keith Corbett, the attorney for the sanitation board of commissioners. Corbett could not be reached for comment.

Sanitation board of commissioners Chairman John Mannone said his board had contacted the county Board of Elections to verify the identities of voters who filled out the 187 affidavits, which he said are in a box — locked on election night — at the sanitation district’s Mott Street headquarters. “We’re going to do what we’ve gotta do to confirm we have registered voters,” he said.

He added that the number of written affidavits was not unusual in his experience, but that because the electronic results were close enough to require that they be counted, the board of elections needed to be involved. “This was always the process,” Mannone said, adding that the most recent commissioners election bared similarities to the one in 2014 between Commissioner Tom Lanning and Mike Franzini, who lost that race.

In it, 184 written affidavits remained uncounted for roughly two months due to concerns over irregularities in the voting process, including a voting machine that counted 140 more votes than people who entered the booth, and worries over preserving the anonymity of voters who filled out the written ballots, according to previous Herald reporting.

Mannone — who was Lanning’s attorney in an injunction asking the board to unseal and count the affidavits — would successfully run for a seat on the board the next year.

“It was the first election that we’ve actually had that’d been close enough that we had to look,” he recalled.

The board of elections, he said, told him that it would take a day to verify the identities of the voters who filled out the written affidavits, and that after that, “We’re hoping for results next week.”