Amanda Purcell reports for Columbia-Greene Media that Columbia County Republican Election Commissioner Jason Natske said Nov. 12 that a hand count of 700 early votes caused the three-day delay in releasing election results last week. The complete Columbia County election results, in fact, have still not been published. Natske said the election officials did not have a working plan for how to count election day votes and early voting votes. “We were required to essentially wait until 9 p.m. to reopen the early vote machines and which from all three sites had transported back to the board of elections,” Natske said. “The challenge for us was we had programmed each poll site individually, and we had to, the following day, merge the results of the three polls sites in order to have one tabulated early vote.” He said county-wide election results will be announced some time this week. Read more about this story at HudsonValley360.com.