N.Y. state Assembly race in Rockaways, Broad Channel neighborhoods of Queens hinges on handful of votes

Every vote counts in southeastern Queens.

Nearly two months after Election Day in New York, the outcome of the contest to represent the 23rd Assembly District remains unclear, with an initial count and a hand recount offering conflicting results.

A single vote separates the two candidates for now.

Just a few ballots could determine whether Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato continues to serve her waterfront district, which runs from Breezy Point in the western Rockaways east to Rockaway Beach and then up through Broad Channel to Ozone Park.

Pheffer Amato, a 56-year-old Democrat, has held the seat since 2017, but faced a fierce Republican challenge this cycle from Thomas Sullivan, a 51-year-old business owner who holds the rank of colonel in the Army Reserve.

After the Nov. 8 election, Sullivan emerged with a lead of about 1 percentage point in incomplete results. When the count was completed later in November, his lead remained, but had tightened to just three votes.

Pheffer Amato nosed into the lead this month, after a manual recount showed her leading by a single vote.

“As it stands right now, Stacey has a one-vote lead,” Matt Rey, a spokesman for the assemblywoman, said Tuesday. But he added, “More ballots will have to be counted.”

The vote count — the subject of legal maneuvering by the two candidates — has had more twists than the Cyclone roller coaster over in Brooklyn’s 46th Assembly District.

Earlier this month, a Queens Supreme Court justice granted Pheffer Amato’s request that the city Board of Elections include 94 mail-in ballots that went uncounted because they were included with unsealed envelopes.

Sullivan appealed the decision, however, and a panel for the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division of the 2nd Judicial Department ruled that rather than simply counting the flawed ballots, the Board of Elections would need to notify any affected voter and allow them to “cure the defect.”

Though Pheffer Amato’s lead currently stands at one vote, it effectively is eight. She is on track to gain nine more votes through write-in votes that were initially disqualified. Sullivan is set to receive two that were initially purged.

Justice Joseph Risi of Queens Supreme Court said in a Dec. 22 ruling that the contested write-in ballots could carry flaws — saying, for example, “Stacey G” or “Stacey Pheffer” — because the assemblywoman was “the only individual for whom these voters reasonably could have intended their write-in ballot to be cast.”

Those ballots are not to be counted until Jan. 4, along with the nearly 100 other ballots that could be cured and counted.

Rey, the spokesman for Pheffer Amato, expressed confidence that she would emerge the winner. “She has a lead — she’ll maintain and increase her lead,” Rey said.

But Adam Fusco, a lawyer for Sullivan, said he was “very confident” the Republican would be declared victorious.

Either way, the tortured election process appears to be approaching its merciful finale next Wednesday.

“The state of Georgia, 3.5 million voters have now had two elections in a month,” Sullivan grumbled on Twitter after the Peach State completed its runoff Senate election between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock. “New York State’s 23rd Assembly District of 32 thousand voters continues to drag on.”