It looks as if Democratic incumbent Monica Wallace and Republican challenger Frank Smierciak will have to wait a while to see who will occupy that State Assembly seat representing Lancaster and Cheektowaga.
On Election Night, Smierciak had a 52-48% lead in the race for a perennially complicated state Assembly district. The kicker in this complicated year is that there are more than 11,000 mailed-in ballots that still have to be counted and it will be several days before that count starts.
Wallace said it is just too close to call and the mail votes are likely to skew Democratic, which clearly helps her re-election efforts.
As a candidate, Smierciak had joined a state-wide Republican push in a law-and-order campaign aimed at Democratic criminal justice changes in the last two years.
"While my opponent would let the criminals go free, what she also supports is the Evidence Discovery Act, which puts the victims at risk," Smierciak said. "It puts their personal information, their addresses, their households on display for the criminals and the criminals themselves have the right to go through those houses and inspect the crime scene."
State Republican Chairman Nick Langworthy ran a strident law-and-order campaign, particularly against bail reform and new evidence rules, like those cited by Smierciak. Key to that is that they were never directly voted on, instead buried in state budget bills.
