Albany County Legislator Sam Fein says every vote should be counted in his Democratic primary against New York State Assemblyman John McDonald of the 108th district. McDonald is leadingin early and in-person vote counts, but thousands of absentee ballots remain to be tallied.
It's a close race. We're down right now, about 466 votes with pretty much everything reported, but likely more than half of the votes aren't yet counted. There's almost 5,000 absentee ballots that have been returned, likely more to come. And they won't start to be opened for a week. So we're feeling really good about it. Want to make sure that every vote is counted. And, you know, we did a lot of outreach to voters, to people who are voting absentee, and we're feeling really good about where we're at.
I spoke with Assemblyman McDonald this morning. He's not claiming victory. But he says he feels very confident that when the absentees are opened, his current lead will hold. What's your reaction to that?
You know, I think there's a lot of uncertainty right now with about half the ballots counted. I can't really say too much about where we're at. But we're confident that we have a really good shot that we're going to come out on top when all the ballots are counted. But right now, we just want to make sure every vote’s counted, and then we'll take it from there.
How did the move to absentee balloting in this campaign because of the pandemic, change your approach?
I'd say what changed the approach more was the fact that everything was so virtual, there wasn't really in person campaigning. So we made a lot of phone calls. We did a lot of virtual events, a lot of social media. So but the absentee piece of it didn't change the aspects of campaigning as much as the fact that everything was so virtual.
Now, you've been saying and other candidates we've been speaking with today have said it's really important to get every vote counted. How will you actually accomplish that?
Well, the, the board of elections, we're going to go through a process and they're gonna know open the balancing and count them. You know, we're gonna be part of that process and respect that process.
You've run for county legislature, obviously, running for state Assembly was the biggest office you've run for before. What did you learn about that level of politics during this campaign? What did you hear from voters about what their number one issue is?
Well, you know, I think what I heard a lot from voters and what the results really shows the voters are really sick of the status quo. You know, voters are sick of the same type of business as usual politics and this race one thing is different from a local county legislator race, this race had a lot of money poured into it, there was over $20,000 of outside spending from an anti-union groups in California, putting in mailers for my opponents. So I didn't take any corporate donations. We ran a good campaign just reaching out to the voters and getting our message out there. So you know, it's different in that way, but we're, you know, we're proud of the campaign we ran and feel very good about it.
Have you had a chance to speak with Assemblyman McDonald yet?
I haven't spoken with him yet. Not since the results have come in.
Is there anything I didn't ask you that you'd like to add, Sam?
We're feeling very confident. You know, we're feeling confident. At the same time there's a lot of uncertainty. We just want to make sure all the votes are counted. We're looking forward to that process.
