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, resulting in 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 of from the 799,827 that were counted on Primary Day last week.
The BOE clarified their screw-up 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.”
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.”
Wiley also blasted the BOE for its latest blunder in a Tuesday night statement.
“This error by the Board of Elections is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed,” Wiley said.
“Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times.”
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