The premiere of multi-election voting – a system in which voters can choose up to five candidates in order of preference – in New York’s mayoral primaries has gotten off to a bad start.
Chaos and confusion marked the night of the vote count on the Democratic Party camp after the Electoral Board announced a “discrepancy” on its Twitter account, removed the latest update on the Democratic primary results, and later , detailed that the system had counted 135,000 test votes.
The mistake raised even more questions about the outcome of a race that was already close. Preliminary results released early in the recount indicated that candidate Eric Adams, Brooklyn Borough President and a former police captain who would be the city’s second black mayor, had lost much of his leadership and was ahead of his rival, former New York Department of Sanitation Director Kathryn Garcia, by less than 16,000 votes.
According to the electoral authorities, the error was that the sample images of the votes used to test the brand new multi-election voting program had not been removed. So when he ran the show, it counted both “rehearsal night and election results, resulting in an additional 135,000 votes.”
The flawed results shortened the distance between Adams and Garcia to just 16,000 votes difference.
“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate steps to ensure that the most accurate and up-to-date results are reported,” election officials said in a statement collected by the Associated Press.
The results initially released Tuesday, and later withdrawn, were incomplete to begin with because they did not include any of the nearly 125,000 absentee votes cast in the Democratic primary.
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The Adams campaign, which had publicly signaled its rejection of the votes after the flawed count was released, said in a statement that it remained confident that he would remain the winning candidate.
García, for his part, although at first he was confident despite the erroneous publication, later his campaign issued a statement that charged against the electoral authorities. “The publication by the Board of Elections of incorrect multi-election votes is deeply concerning and requires a much more transparent and comprehensive explanation. Every preferred choice and every absentee vote must be counted accurately so that all New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and our government, “asked the candidate.
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