The totals for in-person voting as of Tuesday evening, Nov. 3.
For now, the Saratoga Springs city charter has not changed.
In-person voters turned down the charter change by 1,138 votes with all precincts reporting. In-person voting in Saratoga County includes both people who voted on election day and people who voted early at polling stations thoughout the county.
However, the absentee (or mail-in ballots) have not yet been counted, and there may be enough of them outstanding to change the vote on the charter.
Absentee, or mail-in, ballots are not counted until one week after the election, or Tuesday Nov. 10. Any mailed ballot post-marked by election day that arrives Nov. 10 will be counted.
According to Saratoga County Board of Elections Comissioner Roger J. Schiera, 28,722 absentee ballots were sent out to county voters, and more than 21,111 have come back so far.
Some ballots will arrive over the next week in the mail. Also, voters could drop their absentee ballots at the polling stations on election day rather than mail them in. At the time of the interview, absentee ballots collected at the polling stations had not been processed, he said.
"I'm qualifying that [number of ballots] because last night we received large quantities of absentee ballots" from the polling stations, he said on Nov. 4, and ballots were still coming in. The Board of Elections worked with many, many more ballots than in the past since emergency state legislation allowed anyone who might fear covid to vote via mail-in ballot.
"So we have a lot of work to do right now," Schiera said.
Of the 20-some thousand mail-in ballots, not all come from the city. The estimate is that a few thousand might affect Saratoga Springs, and therefore enough ballots may be outstanding to change the intial charter vote count.
The charter change has been put to a vote before and lost everytime, last year by just a handful of votes.
This year's proposition states:
Shall the Saratoga Springs City Charter be amended to provide for a City Council elected from six neighborhood wards of equal population, presided by a Mayor elected citywide, and for the appointment of a City Manager and other administrative officials accountable to the council?