The New York City mayoral primaries are over. This is pretty much the general election, as no Republican is going to be elected in the fall. In a loaded Democratic field, Eric Adams, the former cop and Brooklyn Borough president, seems poised to clinch the nomination. For a time, it looked like a former police officer could become the next mayor of New York City when the Democratic Party is increasingly more pro-crime and anti-police. Adams emphasized public safety as the city is trending towards its Wild West days of the 1980s. When crime spikes, no one cares about much else in New York City. Adams, a black Democrat who made progressives queasy, seemed very close to occupying Gracie Mansion. We knew it was going to take some time to count all the ballots, but Adams initially opened with a very comfortable lead over the rest of the field. Now, the whole show is in chaos. Why? Well, the practice ballots in the machines weren’t removed when the official counting began. I’m not kidding. Some 130,000 practice ballots were counted as real ones. What a fiasco (via Associated Press):
The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system.
The bungle was a black mark on New York City’s first major foray into ranked choice voting and seemed to confirm worries that the city’s Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system.
The disarray began as evening fell, when the board abruptly withdrew data it had released earlier in the day purporting to be a first round of results from the ranked choice system.
That data had indicated that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain who would be the city’s second Black mayor, had lost much of his lead and was ahead of former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 16,000 votes.
[…]
Just before 10:30 p.m. it released a statement saying that 135,000 ballot images it had put into its computer system for testing purposes had never been cleared.
“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported,” it said in a statement.
The results initially released Tuesday, and then withdrawn, were incomplete to begin with because they didn’t include any of the nearly 125,000 absentee ballots cast in the Democratic primary.
The Associated Press removed Tuesday’s vote update from its published vote count after the board pulled the results.
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A lot of people have been blowing the whistle on NY's election administration for years, but this is the most botched election results reporting by an official agency I've ever seen in the U.S.
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) June 30, 2021
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
What the fuck https://t.co/9TlR1FW2LA
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) June 30, 2021
[Laughs in Floridian] https://t.co/EjbIpYKEvP
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 29, 2021
The @BOENYC forgot to take out tens of thousands of practice ballots out of the system before running the RCV simulation today, which resulted in the “discrepancies.”
— Juan Manuel Benítez (@JuanMaBenitez) June 30, 2021
NYC: home to the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, and possibly the world's most pathetic vote-tabulating infrastructure
— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 29, 2021
Election analysts and pollsters all weighed in on this nightmare election.
“What the f**k,” tweeted FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver.
“A lot of people have been blowing the whistle on NY's election administration for years, but this is the most botched election results reporting by an official agency I've ever seen in the U.S.,” wrote Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman.
It’s a mess and it will continue to be so for many more days it seems.
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