NYC mayoral primary race thrown into chaos

 

The Democratic primary race for mayor was thrown into chaos Tuesday as the city Board of Elections appeared to have botched the count amid the city’s first ranked-choice election — adding 135,000 pre-election “test” ballots that hadn’t been cleared from a computer.

According to a BOE statement Tuesday night, “it has determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System . . .

“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported.”

Preliminary results released earlier in the day showed a total of 941,832 ballots cast for mayor, an increase of more than 140,000 from the 799,827 that were counted on June 22, the day of the primary.

The glaring discrepancy at first went unnoticed until it was flagged by front-runner Eric Adams.

“The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,” an Adams spokesman said.

“We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the ranked-choice voting projection.”

In response, the embattled agency scrubbed all the results from its Web site, replacing them with a message saying, “Unofficial Rank Choice ­Results Starting on June 30.”

Some questioned why the agency even released preliminary results.

Veteran political consultant Sid Davidoff, a former aide to the late Mayor John Lindsay, said: “It’s unclear why the Board of Elections put out these preliminary results today as they are relatively meaningless when you have 120,000 absentee ballots still outstanding.

“It would have been more beneficial for them to wait until they had a complete picture rather than further muddy the waters in an already confusing issue,” he added.

The disarray marked the latest in a long line of screw-ups by the BOE, which admitted violating election laws by purging 200,000 voters from its rolls before the 2016 presidential primary.

During the November 2018 midterm elections, some voters were forced to wait hours to cast their ballots because high humidity jammed new scanners that cost a total of $56 million.

And during the 2020 presidential primaries, the board disqualified 80,000 ballots because officials weren’t prepared to handle the deluge of mail-in votes cast amid the coronavirus pandemic.

State Board of Elections Co-chairman Doug Kellner called the situation “very disappointing” and faulted the BOE’s “lack of transparency with respect to the counting of the ranked-choice-cast voting records.”

“Because they haven’t released them, it’s very difficult to find the source of any error,” said Kellner, a Democrat. “It’s possible that they were missing reports from the original number on election night. Another possibility is that they uploaded the same numbers twice.”

Veteran election lawyer Jerry Goldfeder, who doesn’t represent any candidate, said, “It’s not clear if they’re computer glitches or human error.”“It’s just hard to know what’s going to happen.” he said.

Goldfeder said a manual recount of every ballot cast was “possible, if the vote totals are close.”

The unofficial results from the first round of voting last week put Adams ahead of Maya Wiley, a former counsel to outgoing Mayor de Blasio, by 253,234 (31.66 percent) 177,722 (22.22 percent).

But 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 (51.1 percent) to 352,990 or 51.1 (48.9 percent), with Wiley and 10 other candidates eliminated.

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.

Garcia told The Post she was “watching diligently” as the BOE tried to sort out the mess.

The BOE eventually took down the tally.

“We knew we were going to have to be patient regardless, but patience will make it so we end up getting every vote counted and I’m committed to that,” she said.

Meanwhile, Wiley adviser Patrick Gaspard unloaded on the BOE, tweeting, “Someone please tell the NYC Board of Elections that the 1900’s just called and would like to get their manual tally sheets back.”

City Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) said, “Now is as good a time as any to blow up the Board of Elections, get rid of the patronage and start over.”

Fordham political science professor Christina Greer lamented the potential damage to what she called “an incredibly important institution.”

“Confidence is at an all-time low and I’m not sure I want to ask how much lower it can go,” she said. 

“We’re going to have another election in November and then important primaries in 2022.”

Before the controversy erupted, Garcia celebrated the dramatic shift in her fortunes, saying “we look forward to the final results.

“Once all the votes are counted, I know everyone will support the Democratic nominee and that’s ­exactly what I intend to do,” she said in a statement. “Democracy is worth waiting for.”