And the Winner Is... Court Will Decide Starting Friday

The bitter rhetoric between the Fidler and Storobin camps continues to fly, and the ultimate decision will be made by the courts.

Here is what we know after day one of the paper count:

NYT's City Room is reporting that roughly a third of the 1,500 absentee ballots and affidavits were counted, and Mr. Storobin’s lead shrank to 37, but 151 ballots are in dispute. It looks like that the Fidler camp filed the larger part of the challenges.

Lawyers for both campaigns are expected to appear Friday in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn so that a judge can review the ballots in dispute. A major point of contention is if people who asked for absentee ballots based on disabilities, are really disabled.

And accusations are flying:

“We have identified significant patterns of fraud, including a good number of people who sent in absentee-ballot applications who stated they were permanently disabled but then showed up to vote,” Kalman Yeger, Mr. Fidler’s campaign manager, said.

Lawyers for Mr. Fidler’s campaign said they had identified 177 people who had filled out applications for absentee ballots claiming permanent disability, ballots that were collected by the same woman.

And Mr. Storobin's camp is accusing the other side of ethnig profiling:

“These votes are being targeted ethnically for exclusion so it can go to court,” David Simpson, a spokesman for Mr. Storobin, said. “We believe every vote should be counted the same way.”

Mr. Fidler’s campaign hired private investigators to determine the authenticity of the absentee ballots, according to the report.

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