The New York City Board of Elections admitted a major eff up last night in regard to the results of the mayoral primary that used ranked-choice voting for the first time.
“We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report and “[we] ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience,” they tweeted:
We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report. We are working with our RCV technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred. We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience.
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 29, 2021
But they tweeted this AFTER releasing results that showed Eric Adams’ lead evaporating:
The next step is to wait to all absentee ballots to be counted. PIX11 is Your Local Election Headquarters. For continuing election coverage: https://t.co/9SgYrOzCe1 pic.twitter.com/6RX79mESgR
— PIX11 News (@PIX11News) June 29, 2021
Adams questioned those early results, which earned the scorn of the blue-check brigade:
Eric Adams' statement, which goes there pic.twitter.com/xhYORu3Mqy
— Dana Rubinstein (@danarubinstein) June 29, 2021
You, see, “STOP THE STEAL!” is okay when Dems do it:
Democrats questioning election results. Literally shaking. https://t.co/TR8disbuPg
— Brent Scher (@BrentScher) June 29, 2021
https://twitter.com/NumbersMuncher/status/1409996633333452801
STOP THE STEAL https://t.co/U8Z8ezVs6a
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 29, 2021
Apparently, the BOE counted 130,000 test votes and they will re-run the numbers:
Elections 2.0: Sources tell me the Board of Elections is going back to the drawing board and running corrected ranked-choice numbers tomorrow. About 130,000 “votes” were part of a test-run that were never cleared from a computer.
— Bob Hardt (@bobhardt) June 30, 2021
Full statement from the BOE:
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 30, 2021
But the problem could be worse than that, as Dave Wasserman points out:
The deeper I dive into the precinct data, the more obviously underreported EDay precincts I'm finding. At the very least, @BOENYC owes the public an estimate of how many EDay votes (not just absentees) remain uncounted.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) June 30, 2021
CNN is calling it “chaos”:
NYC Board of Elections throws mayoral primary into chaos by mistakenly counting 135,000 test ballots. @ForecasterEnten breaks down what it all means and what's being done to correct it. pic.twitter.com/D6u49gYs1o
— CNN Early Start (@EarlyStart) June 30, 2021
Will AG Merrick Garland investigate NYC, too?
New York City is obviously incapable of holding an election. And the Justice Department is going after Georgia? https://t.co/LKib3reFiT pic.twitter.com/NBvE0rpcE3
— Byron York (@ByronYork) June 30, 2021
And even under the best circumstances, we won’t know a winner for quite some time:
Reminder: it will take a month simply to count votes for a final result in NYC— before any potential challenges or recounts. https://t.co/rhXbnXvZ6V
— Josh Kraushaar (@HotlineJosh) June 30, 2021
Former President Trump released a statement this morning saying “[t]he fact is, based on what has happened, nobody will ever know who really won” and he called for new election “the old-fashioned way, when we had results that were accurate and meaningful”:
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