‘Discrepancy’, confusion in New York City’s mayoral vote count

Some felt the city’s new voting system was mystifying. Now, a glitch has thrown the tallying of votes into disarray.

Eric Adams, Brooklyn borough president and Democratic candidate for New York City Mayor, speaks during a news conference in Brooklyn, New York, June 24, 2021 [Brendan McDermid/Reuters]

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 election to choose the Democratic nominee for November’s race to be the next leader of the United States’ largest city was held a week ago with a complicated new voting method being used for the first time. It allowed voters to rank their top five candidates rather than choosing just one.

Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams had 32 percent of first-choice ballots, based on the incomplete results released on Election Day. Civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley was at 22 percent, and former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia third with 19 percent.

The new data released Tuesday indicated Adams had lost much of his lead.

The confusion surrounding the vote count comes months after former President Donald Trump began promoting unfounded conspiracy theories about the outcome of last November’s presidential election, resulting in Republican-backed voting changes and even election “audits” digging for evidence of vote fraud.

Trump weighed in Wednesday on the New York City count, stating there are “vast irregularities and mistakes” and added that “Eric Adams, despite an almost insurmountable lead, may not win the race.

“The fact is, based on what has happened, nobody will ever know who really won,” Trump argued in a written statement before pivoting to a complaint about November’s presidential results.

Tuesday’s update showed Adams ahead of Garcia by two points, or fewer than 16,000 votes, when voters’ second, third, fourth and fifth choices were factored in under a ranked-voting system being used for the first time in a mayoral contest. Wiley fell into third place in the updated count.

Democratic mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia talks with the media on New York’s Upper West Side, Tuesday, June 22, 2021 [Richard Drew/AP Photo]

Later Tuesday, the city Board of Elections (BOE) tweeted that it was aware of “a discrepancy” in its report on ranked-choice voting results. It did not initially explain what that discrepancy was, even as it removed the data from its website.

It later 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. A note posted on the Board of Elections website indicated it would try posting accurate results without absentee ballots Wednesday.

Regardless of Tuesday’s developments, final results were not expected until mid-July as any results released this week will not include the approximately 125,000 absentee ballots that have been received – potentially enough to alter the final results.

Ranked-choice voting

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 Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system.

The New York vote is widely seen as an important test for proponents of ranked-choice voting.

Most US elections are “winner take all” but some major cities have gone to ranked-choice voting, which supporters argue is more democratic. Countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Ireland use a form of the system.

An election worker goes over a ranked-choice voting explanation card with a voter before she casts her vote during early voting in the primary election, June 14, 2021 in New York City [Mary Altaffer/AP Photo]

The ranked-choice system operates as a series of instant runoffs. The candidate in last place is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed to voters’ second choice. The process repeats until there are only two candidates remaining, and the one with a majority is declared the winner.

In a statement, Adams called Tuesday’s error “unfortunate” and said he was looking forward to an accurate update.

Garcia called the mistake “deeply troubling”, while Wiley blamed the board for “mismanagement.” Both called on election officials to count every vote to ensure voters’ confidence in the outcome.

Wiley was critical of the BOE, saying the chaos Tuesday “is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed”.

New York City’s Board of Elections, which operates independently from City Hall, has long had a reputation for mistakes and mismanagement.

Ahead of the 2016 election, it mistakenly purged tens of thousands of voters from voting rolls. In 2018, voters had to wait in line for several hours at some polling places over equipment issues.

In 2020, it struggled to process applications for absentee ballots and initially sent many voters ballots with return envelopes printed with the wrong people’s names on them.

Whoever emerges as the winner of the Democratic primary will be a heavy favourite in November’s general election in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one.

The Democratic winner will face Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels civilian patrol group, in November.

And if one of the top three Democrats wins the nomination, they would make history if elected in November. Either Adams or Wiley would be the second Black mayor of New York City, and either Garcia or Wiley would be the first woman mayor.

Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies