Now on Election Day, I’d spent six hours poll watching in my own First Ward, which voted right next to the Second Ward in the St. Mary’s gym. For six hours, I watched my neighbors from the other side of town turning out in droves and standing in line to cast their ballots. To my mind, there was no way that 206 of them had voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin. And as it happens, they didn’t.

For some unknown reason, the results from Hudson 5-2—that part of Hudson that abuts Greenport to the north—were attributed to the Second Ward, not just in the presidential race but in all races.

Geeta Cheddie, Democratic Deputy Commissioner, explained that the election inspectors working at the Second Ward polling place had failed to call in their results. Michael O’Hara, who was the chair of the Second Ward inspectors, admits that, instead of waiting for a line free up to phone in the results, he simply carried the completed canvass sheets the five blocks across town and delivered them to the Board of Elections. While failure to phone in the numbers might explain a delay in posting Second Ward results, it doesn’t explain why the wrong results got recorded.

The Board of Elections is a frantic place right after the polls close, and we will probably never know exactly how a mistake like this happened. The good news is that, after several people questioned the results, the correct numbers were found, and things were put right, but they would have been corrected anyway when the machines were opened and the vote was recanvassed.

The actual count for the Second Ward was 416 votes for Barack Obama and 63 for John McCain. Obama took nearly 86 percent of the vote. But even these apparently more accurate numbers are subject to change. The absentee ballots and the affidavit ballots remain to be counted.