Election Disaster: Over 100,000 Ineligible Votes Found in New York City's Mayoral Election
As concerns over American election integrity continue to swell, election officials in New York City announced a major “discrepancy” had occurred in their city’s mayoral primary.
On Tuesday, the New York City Board of Elections announced that a “discrepancy” in the vote tally had been found and was being investigated.
We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report. We are working with our RCV technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred. We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience.
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 29, 2021
Later that night, the board put out an additional statement announcing that as many as 135,000 ineligible votes used for “pre-qualification testing” had been counted in the Democratic primary.
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 30, 2021
“The Board of Elections conducts rigorous and mandatory pre-qualification testing for every election. It has been determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System (EMS),” the board’s statement read.
“When the cast vote records were extracted for the first pull of [ranked-choice voting] results, it included both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records.”
[firefly_poll]
The Hill reported this is the first time New York has utilized ranked-choice voting in a mayoral race.
Shortly before the error was found, the latest tally of votes released had shown the Democratic mayoral primary race to be razor-thin, with candidate Eric Adams leading contender Kathryn Garcia by a mere 2 percentage points, or 15,908 votes, according to the outlet.
Prior to the board’s announcement of the error, Adams had voiced concerns over the discrepancy, releasing a statement on Twitter.
Here’s our statement from earlier: pic.twitter.com/E39ssnLCmF
— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) June 30, 2021
Adams’ concerns were dismissed by a series of left-leaning journalists and pundits, who likened his concerns to those of former President Donald Trump and painted Adams as a conspiracy theorist.
Big shout out to the pundits who celebrated Adams as a “normie” and the sensible centrist. https://t.co/WE6C4JZ5uZ
— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) June 29, 2021
Something to consider is that the corrosive Big Lie conspiracy-theorizing and delegitimization of elections that Trump and the GOP have unleashed, won’t necessarily just stay contained to them.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 29, 2021
This is really amazing. Countless smug liberals — @HeerJeet, @chrislhayes, Vox’s @imillhiser — spent hours maligning and sneering at Eric Adams as a Trumpian fraud for questioning the NYC election results. When those questions were completely vindicated, they slinked away. https://t.co/gKbNNHDpUd
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 30, 2021
“This is really amazing. Countless smug liberals — @HeerJeet, @chrislhayes, Vox’s @imillhiser — spent hours maligning and sneering at Eric Adams as a Trumpian fraud for questioning the NYC election results,” acclaimed journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote on Twitter.
“When those questions were completely vindicated, they slinked away.”
