Late last night the NYC Board of Elections admitted they screwed up big time in their mayoral primary, by ‘forgetting’ to purge 135k test ballots from the system:
NYPOST – The too-close-to-call Democratic primary race that will likely decide New York’s next mayor was thrown into disarray after election officials admitted they accidentally included “test” results in the vote count, leading to 135,000 extra ballots.
The botching of the city’s first ranked-choice election was first flagged by front-runner Eric Adams, who pointed out that preliminary results from the Board of Elections showed that 941,832 votes were cast for the Democratic mayoral nomination, a huge increase from the 799,827 that were counted on primary day last week.
The BOE clarified its screwup in a tweet Tuesday night.
“It has been determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System (EMS),” the board said of the fiasco.
“When the cast votes were extracted for the first pull of RCV {ranked choice voting} results, it included both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the mea culpa continued.
“The board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported.”
Eric Adams leads by roughly 2% as of now, but there’s still a ways to go:
Tuesday’s unofficial results, after a total of 11 rounds of ranked-choice counting, had Adams narrowly leading former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia by 368,898 votes to 352,990 or 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent, with Maya Wiley and 10 other candidates eliminated.
“Today’s mistake by the Board of Elections was unfortunate,” Adams tweeted in response. “It’s critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time.”
A total of 219,944 ballots “with no choices left” were listed as “inactive.” But the city still has yet to count more than 124,000 absentee ballots sent by mail.
“New Yorkers want free and fair elections, which is why we overwhelmingly voted to enact ranked choice voting,” Garcia said in a press release. “The BOE’s release of incorrect ranked choice votes is deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation.”
Why are there so many absentee ballots? The pandemic is over and so should those horrible pandemic voting policies.
Also, these are the same people who mocked Trump for claiming the 2020 election was rigged. And now they are rigging their own elections!
Trump responded to this madness this morning:
This is at least the second time Democrats have screwed up their elections in New York in a single year. Remember the local mail-in ballot madness from last year at this time?
Also why does it take so long to count ballots???
Remember, American Idol calculated millions of votes during a commercial break… but for New York City, it'll take a few weeks
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) June 30, 2021