Van DeWater leads GOP primary in 19th District
Kyle Van DeWater has a commanding lead over Ola Hawatmeh in the 19th Congressional District GOP primary, according to available results.
With all ballots counted in eight of the 11 counties in the district, and some tallied in the remaining three counties, Van DeWater had 10,432 votes to Hawatmeh’s 7,841, according to numbers provided Tuesday by county election boards.
The results included all votes that were cast on Primary Day, June 23, and during the early voting period that preceded it. Mailin ballots, which were far more numerous than usual this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, still were being tallied in Delaware, Sullivan and Montgomery counties.
Van DeWater, a Millbrook resident, carried seven of the eight counties in which the results were complete. Hawatmeh, who has homes in Pleasant Valley and Oneonta, carried only Otsego County, where Oneonta is located, winning by 134 votes.
Van DeWater carried Ulster County by 450 votes and Dutchess County by 787.
Hawatmeh, a strong supporter of President Donald Trump, echoed his attacks on mailin voting in a July 5 opinion piece posted on the “American Greatness” website.
Without evidence, Hawatmeh wrote that she is “patient zero of the virus of deadly electoral fraud that will sweep the nation if widespread mail-in voting becomes the norm.”
Much of the opinion piece, titled “Barr Is Right to Flag Mail-In Voting as Risky,” consists of a letter Hawatmeh sent to U.S. Attorney General William Barr. In it, she asked him for an investigation of mailin voting but did not cite any evidence or examples of fraud. Instead, she wrote that it didn’t seem possible that she was trailing Van DeWater after outspending him, leading him in the tally of votes that were cast in person, and given that he “was almost completely absent from campaign events” because of his military reserve duty.
“I reasonably perceive that the 19th District election is in the process of being stolen because of mailin voting,” she wrote.
Two election commissioners in the 19th District, one from each major party, dismissed the notion of fraud associated with votes that were mailed in.
“We were extremely thorough here,” said Columbia County Republican Commissioner of Elections Kelly Miller-Simmons. “We think we did a pretty good job with what was thrown at us, and I think our results are pretty accurate.”
Ulster County Democratic Elections Commission Ashley Dittus said Hawatmeh has “clearly no understanding of the process” and that any suggestion of fraud can be “easily debunked.”
The winner of the Republican primary in the 19th Congressional District will run against first-term U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado, DRhinebeck, in November.
Delgado got 11 write-in votes in the GOP primary in Dutchess County, where he lives.
The 19th District comprises all of Ulster, Greene, Columbia, Sullivan, Delaware, Schoharie and Otsego counties; most of Dutchess County; parts of Rensselaer and Montgomery counties; and a small section of Broome County.