NEW YORK VOTING IN MAYOR’S CASE IS AGAIN, A CHAOTIC MESS

 

     …Eric Adams, currently in the lead for Mayor of New York.  But will he stay there?

 

New York City has a long history of poorly run elections.

 

The nation’s electoral system, is under strain amid false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.  It faced a new setback this week as New York City officials acknowledged making critical mistakes tallying votes in the Democratic mayoral primary.

City election officials announced late Tuesday that they had mistakenly included 135,000 test ballots in early tallies.  This  skewed the count and called into question early unofficial results showing the Brooklyn Borough President, Eric Adams ahead.  Former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia was in a close second place. The Board of Elections removed those results from its website, and asked the public to “have patience”.   On Wednesday, they issued an apology that pinned the blame on “human error that could have been avoided.”

The episode called attention to the heavily Democratic city’s long history of shoddy election administration. And it represents an awkward turn for national Democrats.  This is as they try to defend the soundness of the country’s elections, while accusing former president Donald Trump and his GOP allies of undermining democracy.  This is through their baseless claims that last year’s election was tainted by widespread fraud.

Trump pounced at the chance to compare the confusion in New York to his own defeat last year, claiming in a statement that “nobody will ever know who really won.”

Maine was the first state to use ranked-choice voting statewide.

Voting rights advocates, have devoted much of their time in recent months to highlighting efforts by Republican-led states to tighten voting restrictions.  They turned their attention to the voting drama unfolding this time in one of the country’s liberal bastions.

“It’s not good timing,” said Lawrence Norden, director of the Brennan Center’s Election Reform Program. “Unfortunately, we’re living in a world where any errors in election administration are going to be used by political leaders to spread disinformation about our elections.”

In New York’s case, Norden added, “there was a real failure.”

This mess also comes on the heels of another major election failure by the Democrats.  In last year’s Iowa caucuses, when their new reporting software crashed, it delayed results and lead to obvious inaccuracies when the tallies finally began trickling out, a day after voting was over.

This week, the New York City Board of Elections was not immediately forthcoming with the details about what went wrong. It’s press office did not reply to a request for comment. But the counting error and the ensuing uncertainty about who won have brought unfavorable attention to the city.  This was the first year of ranked-choice voting.  The new system allows voters to select up to five candidates in their order of preference. If no candidate surpasses 50%, lower-finishing candidates are nixed.  Their voters’ subsequent choices are tabulated in a series of tallies until one candidate emerges with a majority.

Ranked-choice voting is popular in all the jurisdictions that use it.  In New York, voters approved the election method overwhelmingly. Its value, advocates say,, is to eliminate costly runoffs and prevent a less popular candidate from winning when opponents split the remaining vote.  In other words, to advance the candidate, who is the most acceptable to the most number of voters.

But New York City election officials were ill prepared for the method’s complexities.  That includes a basic issue of ranked-choice voting, which is to “not release any results until all ballots have been tabulated.”

“We’re shaking our heads here in Maine, because ranked-choice voting was so smooth here,” said Shenna Bellows (D), Secretary of State in Maine.  This is where voters overwhelmingly approved the method in a referendum. “In ranked-choice voting, one thing that’s unique is that the initial round is not necessarily determinative of the final winner. So the person who receives the most first-place votes will not always win. What’s concerning about partial reporting of ballots is that it can skew the result, and that undermines public confidence in the vote.”

New York City’s elections board screwed up when they released a preliminary count of the ranked-choice vote before more than 120,000 absentee ballots had been counted.  This gave Eric Adams what looked to be a commanding lead. However, on Tuesday, the board released a second tally that erroneously included tens of thousands of “dummy” ballots not cast by voters but intended to test the system.  That tally narrowed Adams’s lead over Garcia before it was pulled from the website.

This sudden addition of the extra ballots baffled the candidates. In a statement, Adams, who had all but declared victory after leading with in-person, first-choice votes, questioned the “irregularities” in the count. His closest rivals for the nomination piled on, with attorney Maya Wiley citing “generations of failures” by the election board and Garcia calling the blunders “deeply troubling.”

Adams had previously criticized the ranked-choice system, dispatching surrogates before the primary to condemn it.  This was after Garcia and another Democratic candidate, Andrew Yang, urged their supporters to include both candidates on their ballots.

Rob Richie, the founder and chief executive of the group FairVote, said it was not “surprising to anybody” that the city struggled to count the votes.

“This has nothing to do with ranked-choice voting and everything to do with mistakes that the board of elections has made,” Richie said.

Anger at the city’s Board of Elections has been simmering for years, with much of the criticism coming from left-wing activists, insurgent primary candidates and good-government groups.

“Look, the commissioners are politically appointed,” said Susan Lerner, the New York executive director of the group Common Cause. “They are part-time amateurs and not election administrators. And that is really not the way to handle election administration for the second-largest voting jurisdiction in the country.”

Eight years ago, the city’s Department of Investigation probed the board, finding it studded with “nepotism, incompetence and waste” before incoming mayor Bill de Blasio (D) took office. In early 2016, roughly 200,000 voters were unknowingly struck from the rolls, most of them registered Democrats, a blunder that affected that year’s presidential primary. Some supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) accused the Democratic establishment of intentionally suppressing his vote. 

“It’s absurd,” Sanders said at one of his final pre-primary rallies. De Blasio, who had endorsed Hillary Clinton over Sanders, fired back that such talk carried the dangerous potential to undermine “the entire electoral process.”

Even after voting changes were enacted in 2019, the problems have persisted. In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, despite a two-month delay of the primary date, it took nearly two more months for votes to be counted in two close House primaries in the city.

Suraj Patel, a two-time primary challenger to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), cried foul last year after postal workers in Brooklyn failed to stamp some absentee-ballot envelopes with the date.  That’s a requirement in New York. When he cried foul, Maloney’s campaign, which had declared victory, demanded that he “concede that the voters have spoken and stop validating Trump’s undermining our democratic processes.”

Responses like that, Patel said, were mostly helpful to Trump and his party.  This was by blocking the momentum to enact real improvements in city elections. Now, the city has lived through yet another problem-plagued election.  Giving the Republicans yet another argument “to justify more fake audits and more anti-voting laws,” Patel said.

“Trump’s claim that the true results of the primary “will never be known,” for instance, is demonstrably untrue,” Norden said.  “That’s because New York uses paper ballots that can be individually hand-tallied if necessary.”

Norden also noted that officials caught the mistake and fixed it, just as election administrators did last fall in Michigan’s Antrim County, another heavily Republican county.  This was a location where the initial results gave Joe Biden the lead.  Election officials quickly established that the issue was caused by human error, saying a clerk’s failure to update software just before the election was responsible for the incorrect tally.  When it was quickly updated, it reflected Trump’s victory.

“There are checks in place to catch these things,” Norden said.

That has not stopped Trump and his allies from continuing to claim that widespread fraud tainted the 2020 election.  This is including in Antrim, where activists have insisted that the initial error is a sign of faulty or manipulated machines that cost Trump votes elsewhere.

As they hammered the New York City elections board, Democrats were wary of feeding criticism of the ranked-choice process, or of amplifying Trump.

“It’s the kind of gaffe that many of us have been calling out for a very, very long time,” New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said on a call with reporters. “The notion that somehow, if we didn’t have ranked-choice voting, it would be smoother is one I don’t agree with. If we didn’t have ranked-choice voting, we probably still wouldn’t know who won.”

We all need to figure that Trump will stick with his yelling “election fraud is why he lost the election”.  That’s why it is so important that all election boards take extra precautions to make sure all elections are accurate.

This is so important for our fragile democracy.

Copyright G. Ater 2021