It’s one heck of a huge mess in New York City over the results in the mayoral race.
As I reported last night, the election was last Tuesday, and on that day, with most of the votes in, it looked like Eric Adams had a big lead, over second-place Maya Wiley and third place Kathryn Garcia. But then with the numbers released yesterday, suddenly Garcia took a huge jump and came within about 16,000 votes of Adams. But Adams wasn’t buying it, noting how 100,000 plus votes just seemed to materialize out of the air, in comparison to the number of votes they said existed on Tuesday night.
People on the left immediately attacked Adams for questioning the numbers. But then the NY Board of Elections admitted there was a “discrepancy.” That’s one word for it. There are others – like how the heck could this have happened? You have one job and how do you screw it up so badly?
But as more information came out, they said what they had done was accidentally counted about 135,000 “test ballots.” They said they hadn’t purged the system so those false numbers were added in with the real count.
Here’s their full statement as to what happened.
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 30, 2021
But they noticed because Adams complained, plus it was such a huge and obvious deviation from the numbers of alleged voters that was given on election night.
Even CNN couldn’t believe it and called 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
But that may not be all if Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman is to be believed. Wasserman said there appears to be a lot of Election Day underreporting going on, including in pro-Adams areas. So another issue that could count against the pro-police Democrat? And this is just the election day and early votes, they haven’t even gotten into the question of the 124,000 plus absentee votes which reportedly will take them some time to further count.
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
Potentially. There are thousands (unclear exactly how many) of uncounted EDay votes all over the city, but higher concentrations in the Bronx & other pro-Adams areas. It likely to increase Adams's lead heading into the final round of RCV. By how much? Hard to say. https://t.co/a4XZURrAQi
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) June 30, 2021
To my knowledge, @BOENYC hasn't made clear how many *affidavit* ballots are outstanding from EDay in addition to the 125,419 uncounted absentees it lists. If anyone has answers, feel free to reply.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) June 30, 2021
My condensed notes on the state of play in NYC… pic.twitter.com/0IxLZhvK6J
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) June 30, 2021
What an absolute madhouse. NYC Board of Elections was already awful and bad at their jobs. But by adding in all sorts of other parameters with Rank Choice Voting, they’ve really gone over the slide. Now how is anyone supposed to have faith when they do things like this? Then you’re not supposed to question when it’s so clearly such a mess?
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