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November 16, 2009, 4:00 a.m. Dede Scozzafava Is No GOP ModerateShe is a donkey in an elephant costume. By Deroy Murdock Re-canvassed votes in upstate New York’s 23rd Congressional District foreshadow the second coming of third-party candidate Doug Hoffman. As Mark Weiner of the Syracuse Post-Standard reported Thursday morning, Conservative nominee Hoffman’s 5,335-vote deficit behind Democrat Bill Owens has shrunk to just 3,026 after Election Night tabulation errors were corrected. Some 10,200 absentee ballots remain uncounted. State Board of Elections spokesman John Conklin told Weiner, “All ballots will be counted, and if the result changes, Owens will have to...

Our Campaign Is Not Over Yet! So many people have written hoping we continue the fight, count every ballot and make sure no one steals this election. Acorn and the unions did their best to try and say that the conservative movement was a sham. Rest assured they will not succeed. On Election Night the information we received was far different from what we received this week. They will not silence our voice that easily! There is also the fact that NY is using the Sequoia Voting Systems machines. Princeton University (http://citp.princeton.edu/voting/advantage/) cited them as having been susceptible to voter...

* What can we all do, every day, to make sure we are ready to prevent fraud in the Iowa Caucus in 2012? PLEASE take this seriously. A massive effort was launched on Dr. Utopia’s behalf from Chicago to game the Iowa Caucus. A good portion of Chicago rolled across the Illinois border to vote in Dubuque, Waterloo, Des Moines,you name it to ensure Dr. Utopia won that Caucus in 2008. The caucus centers are chaos hatcheries. Dr. Utopia’s goons, most of whom certainly appeared to be ACORN or SEIU, marched in, took over, and told anyone who wouldn’t stand...

Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life (HarperCollins) is being pitched by her publisher as "one ordinary citizen's extraordinary journey." That's about right. Palin is ordinary -- remarkably, overwhelmingly, mind-numbingly ordinary. Back in the day, it seemed as if she might be extraordinary. When I started writing about her in 2006, the year that Palin took on the good old boys of Alaskan Republican politics, she seemed intriguing -- even a little, dare we say it, rogue. The story of a small-town mayor mounting a primary challenge to a sitting governor of her own party -- who also happened to...

The pathetic irony in this story is that the racketeering party, the Democrats, claimed "victory" on election day despite the fact that they were routed nationwide. They hung their sad little lies on this tiny race. Hoffman never had a shot. He was a strange little conservative candidate but the RINO on the Republican ticket was so repulsive to those of us on the right, it split the Republican vote. So much so, the RINO Dede Scozzafava withdrew and threw her weight behind the ....Democrat! The Republican party has been hijacked and driven underground by the RINOs (Republican in name...

As it stands now, Bill Owens may be in Washington and voting the Pelosi Party line but when the vote is certified he may be ousted. The state Board of Elections indicated that "...all ballots will be counted, and if the result changes, Owens will have to be removed." Concession speech or not, if the voters in the 23rd District elected Doug Hoffman and not Bill Owens, then Hoffman will be the Representative.

GOUVERNEUR, NY - Despite the fact that Bill Owens has already been sworn-in and has voted on crucial legislation in the House of Representatives, he may not have actually won the NY-23 Congressional Special Election. Several errors were made during the initial vote counts. Over 2,000 votes for contender Doug Hoffman were not counted in the preliminary results, narrowing the current vote gap to less than 3,000 votes between Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Doug Hoffman. The errors were discovered during the standard vote recanvas that has been underway since November 4th. The largest error occurred in Oswego County where...

A recanvassing of votes cast in the highly contested NY-23 race shows that the 5,335-vote lead once enjoyed by Rep.-for-now Bill Owens, the Democrat, has narrowed to about 3,000 with another 10,000 absentee ballot uncounted. Owens, who was sworn in last week, was one of 220 Dems to vote give the majority a narrow victory on health care reform. UPDATE: Josh Kraushaar, who has been following this closely, says Conservative Party boss Mike Long thinks Owens is going to win at the end of the day -- because only about 5,400 absentees have been returned. The Syracuse Post-Standard: But Hoffman’s...

Democrat Bill Owens delivers his victory speech at his headquarters in Plattsburgh last week. Owens declared victory after Conservative nominee Doug Hoffman conceded the 23rd Congressional District race election night. Now recanvassing shows the special election has narrowed to a 3,000-vote difference, and will be decided by a count of absentee ballots. The Associated PressDemocrat Bill Owens delivers his victory speech at his headquarters in Plattsburgh last week. Owens declared victory after Conservative nominee Doug Hoffman conceded the 23rd Congressional District race election night. Now recanvassing shows the special election has narrowed to a 3,000-vote difference, and will be decided...

Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party nominee who lost to Democrat Bill Owens in New York’s special election last week, says he is “seriously considering” another run for the seat. Hoffman told the conservative Human Events newspaper in a story published Thursday that after losing 49 percent to 47 percent, he is assessing his chances of defeating Owens next year.

Boy, if this recanvassing comes out with a big surge of votes for Doug Hoffman, a whole lot of post-election analyses are going to have to be rewritten: "A recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections. In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes — 12,748 to 11,000. The new vote totals mean the...

That headline may be premature, but it was even MORE premature to swear in Owens last Friday before all the votes were counted!Democrats didn't waste any time swearing in Bill Owens to take a seat in Congress representing the 23rd Congressional District of New York. While the Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman had conceded the race on election night when it looked like he was down by over 5,000 votes, all the ballots had yet to be counted and a string of reporting errors underreported Hoffman's totals by thousands of votes. The official vote count is now so close that the...

Election Night Last Tuesday, with 93% of the vote counted Doug Hoffman was down 5,335 votes with and he had barely won his stronghold in conservative Oswego County. Hoffman did the right thing and conceded the special election in the NY 23rd Congressional district. Democrat Bill Owens was seated in Congress (based on the Hoffman concession) even though NY State had yet to certify the election. Among his first acts was to vote for the Obamacare bill with the government option even though he promised that he would vote against any bill with a government option. The Central New York...

On election night, Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman conceded defeat to Democratic candidate Bill Owens after dramatically under-performing in key counties and deciding that he couldn’t overcome the gap. Today, the campaign is “looking very closely” at a recanvass of the district that has revealed, as recanvasses often do, screw-ups in the initial count. What was a 5,335-vote margin for Owens on election night is now a 3,026-vote margin, due largely to initial under-reporting of Hoffman votes in Oswego County and Jefferson County. According to Mark Weiner’s report, the Hoffman campaign is leaving open the option of legal challenges if...

Washington -- Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County. As it turns out, neither was true. But Hoffman’s concession -- based on snafus in Oswego County and elsewhere that left his vote undercounted -- set off a chain of events that echoed all the way to Washington, D.C., and helped secure passage of a historic health care reform bill....

Washington -- Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County. As it turns out, neither was true.

Word in from NY 23 that Conservative Doug Hoffman now trails by just 3000 votes as the official  tabulation process continues. "The new vote totals mean the race will be decided by absentee ballots, of which about 10,200 were distributed."  Among the absentee ballots that remain uncounted are "military and overseas ballots received by this coming Monday (and postmarked by Nov. 2)..." But Bill Owens "was quickly sworn into office on Friday, a day before the rare weekend vote in the House of Representatives.  His support sealed his party's narrow victory on the health care legislation." By what right does...

Just when you thought you wouldn't have to spell "Dede Scozzafava" anymore, the Republican nominee in that upstate New York special election is back -- lashing out at Sarah Palin and others who worked against her bid. In a revealing interview with The Washington Post, Scozzafava, a member of the New York State Assembly who lost her leadership post in the wake of her election loss, talks about what it's like to see her name turned into a verb (Gov. Charlie Crist, R-Fla., is the next candidate in danger of getting "Scozzafaved.")

Just when you thought you wouldn't have to spell "Dede Scozzafava" anymore, the Republican nominee in that upstate New York special election is back -- lashing out at Sarah Palin and others who worked against her bid. In a revealing interview with The Washington Post, Scozzafava, a member of the New York State Assembly who lost her leadership post in the wake of her election loss, talks about what it's like to see her name turned into a verb (Gov. Charlie Crist, R-Fla., is the next candidate in danger of getting "Scozzafaved.")

Doug Hoffman’s narrow defeat in New York’s 23rd Congressional District special election was one of few blemishes in a nearly flawless Election Day for Republicans. But Hoffman’s strong showing — coupled with the successful uprising against Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava’s candidacy — will embolden some conservatives to consider abandoning the GOP and initiating a broader third-party movement. As a staunch conservative Republican whose political action committee invested much in Hoffman’s campaign, I believe nothing would hurt the conservative movement, or the GOP, more. National Democrats would love nothing more than for conservatives to start looking for third-party candidates all across...