The New York Post posted an article today about the ongoing saga of the New York City Democrat primary race. There seems to be an unusual amount of difficulty in getting the votes counted and figuring out who the Democrat candidate for New York City Mayor will be.
The article reports:
The city’s bumbling Board of Elections said Wednesday that Eric Adams maintained his lead in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary — one day after officials threw the race into chaos with a botched count.
Preliminary results posted on the embattled election agency’s website showed Adams narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia, 358,521 votes (51.1 percent} to 343,766 (48.9 percent).
In an ironic twist, the percentages are identical to the ones reported Tuesday, when Garcia overtook Maya Wiley to vault into second place pending the counting of absentee ballots.
But the vote spread between Adams and Garcia shrank to 14,755 from 15,908.
In a statement, Adams’ campaign called the results a “simulation,” adding: “Our campaign was the first choice of voters on Election Day and is leading this race by a significant margin because we put together a five-borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, more affordable place.”
The article notes:
In a public apology late Tuesday night, the BOE said those results included a test run of 135,000 fake votes that weren’t cleared from its computer system.
The error marked the latest in a series of screw-ups that have plagued recent elections in the city.
But the corrected count is far from complete, with more than 125,000 mail-in, absentee ballots that arrived ahead of Tuesday’s deadline still being counted.
…Tuesday’s epic fail has sparked calls for reform that include disbanding the 10-member Board of Elections, which is composed of five Democrats and five Republicans — one each from the city’s five boroughs — who are hand-picked by their local party leaders.
“We’ve seen some pretty bad errors before, but this one seems to be a national embarrassment,” city Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said Wednesday.
“Hopefully, the national nature of this will finally spur some change.”
It’s time to consider making some changes to our election process. It is clear that in some places, it is not working. I don’t know whether this is the result of incompetence or if someone is trying to change the results, but American voters need confidence in their elections. If the current officials do not inspire that confidence, we need new officials.