Croton Decides 2024: Today is Election Day, but we won’t have official tallies of write-in votes for up to two weeks.

"Recanvassing” of votes, which includes the counting of write-ins, is tentatively scheduled to begin November 16. Nearly 4000 early votes were recorded in Croton-based machines.

Today is a day of decision for the nation, the state, and local communities. Yet while we may—repeat, may—have an idea who will be our next president and Congressman before we go to bed tonight, we may not know the winners of two open Croton Board of Trustees seats until at least November 16 and probably later.

That’s because the two Croton Democrat candidates on the ballot, Len Simon and Maria Slippen, have been facing a lively and well organized write-in campaign by Voice of Croton candidates Gary Eisinger and Nigel Ravelo.

And while election officials will know this evening how many votes Simon and Slippen received, based on machine totals reported from each polling station and also from early vote tallies, write-in votes will not be counted until November 16, according to Westchester County election officials.

(The officials add that this date is subject to change, and that it is not yet known how many days the so-called “recanvassing” of votes will take.)

Any guesswork about who won the Croton election will be complicated by the fact that a reported nearly 4000 people voted early at our municipal building—although many of those voters reportedly came from outside of Croton, and thus were not eligible to vote in our local election.

Thus while poll workers will report their totals to county election officials tonight, right after the polls close—and those totals will apparently include how many ballots were “marked” with a write-in vote—the number of write-ins from early ballots have not yet been disclosed as far as we are aware. (The Chronicle will attempt to clarify this question in the coming days.)

The recanvass of both voting machine and write-in totals will begin on November 16, according to the current schedule put out by election officials. It will start at the Board of Elections’s facility on Saw Mill River Road in Ardsley, at 10 am that day. The recanvass, conducted by between six and eight teams, will continue each day until it is completed. But ballots with write-in votes will be taken to the Board’s White Plains office and counted there by a bipartisan team, election officials told us. The Chronicle plans to be present for that counting process.

We hope to get a clearer picture of this process in the coming days. But in the meantime, any speculations about who actually won the two Croton trustee seats would probably be on shaky ground, especially if the totals turn out to be close.

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