The season is over, but there you still have to clean up the wrapping paper and find places for your new stuff. Eventually we'll take the signs down and throw all of the campaign fliers away.

Tomorrow, the county starts their canvassing of voting machines. They'll compare the unofficial results to the receipts from the voting machines and likely adjust the numbers up and down.

I'm planning on hanging out with them while they canvass the machines, so I'll be reporting what the numbers look like in each town in the county and how they compare.

I'm particularly interested in the difference between the number of voters who weighed in on the presidential race in the city and the number of people who voted for and against charter change.

Looking at the rough figures at the Republican HQ last night in the Holiday Inn, it looked like the difference was a little more than 2,000 voters. It remains to be seen whether the difference was because the proposition was on the back of the ballot or because those people didn't care/know enough to want to vote on it, but I'm sure there is a combination of the two.

We're also looking at how voting went this year at the polls. Did poll workers tell you there was a proposition on the back? Did they hover too close? Did they take your ballot out of the envelope to feed it into the machine? I've heard anecdotes about all of these things and more.

Check out the claim from Wendy Long (Republican candidate for Kirsten Gillibrand's seat who lost pretty handily)  who says she was encouraged to vote Dem:

"This morning when I went to vote, a poll worker who was at the scanner, studied my private ballot and proceeded to tell me that it was rejected because I did not 'fill in every space.' She then proceeded to indicate that I should mark the Democratic line all the way down.
The poll worker said, 'you have to fill in all of THESE, all the way down," indicating the whole line at the far left of the ballot, saying 'you can't leave any blank.'"
I said, "I'm sorry, but that just can't be the case .... that would force me to vote for people I don't want to vote for."  She insisted again, that every office had to be filled out or the ballot would be rejected. And I said again "I don't want to vote for those people!"
I protested again and said that I wanted to feed my ballot into the scanner as I had filled it out. She eventually relented  saying 'well you can TRY it'  -- meaning she would allow me to put it in the scanner.
It obviously worked...

Anyway, if you had crazy polling site story, let us know. E-mail me at lmccarty@saratogian.com, call me at 584-4242 ext. 221 or comment below.

In the meantime, canvassing begins at 10 a.m. and I'll be tweeting, so tune in.

In semi-related news, the campaign season is over and I can get to that list of things I've been looking to cover/investigate/write about. If you have any suggestions for issues/topics you'd like looked into feel free to e-mail me at lmccarty@saratogian.com or comment below. I can't promise I'll write about everything, but all (serious) suggestions will be considered and looked into.