The Patriot Post® · NYC's Bungled Election Underscores GOP Push for Integrity
The Left’s latest voting concoction — “ranked choice voting,” or RCV — has not produced greater clarity. Just the opposite, in fact. New York City’s adoption of RCV for its mayoral contest has resulted in greater complication for voting tabulation and increased confusion, ruining the possibility for more public confidence in the integrity and accuracy of an election’s outcome.
So, what is RCV? For one thing, New Yorkers were sold on the idea that it’s an attempt to avoid expensive and low-turnout runoffs. As National Review’s editors note, it was also supposed to “decrease negative campaigning and produce winners who had proved successful at building coalitions.”
Well, confusion reigns. As The Wall Street Journal explains, “The city’s Board of Elections on Tuesday released an updated tally, meant to show where the candidates stood after several rounds of recounting. Each round eliminated the candidate with the fewest votes, and reassigned votes to the next-ranked candidate on each voter’s ballot.”
In this instance, after the first round of counting, the Democrat mayoral primary candidate garnering the most votes was former NYPD officer Eric Adams, who enjoyed a sizable 14-point lead over the second-place contender. Indeed, he appeared last week to be the likely winner. However, following the elimination counting round, third-place candidate Kaythryn Garcia closed the gap to within two percentage points, which amounts to 14,755 votes with more than 124,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted.
What on election day, June 22, was presumed to be a clear win for Adams has been thrown into doubt. But it’s not just the RCV system of tallying votes. On Tuesday, the election board also announced that a mistake had been made in the vote count — some 135,000 test run votes were included in the actual vote tally, throwing off the number. There is still no official vote number, and it will likely take at least another week before a winner is announced.
The error elicited this response from the Adams campaign: “There are still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric — and we are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied. … Every candidate should respect the democratic process and be committed to supporting whomever the voters have selected to be the Democratic nominee for Mayor.”
This serves to underscore the reason why several GOP-run states have been passing election integrity laws. As voter fraud and mistakes happen during elections, it would be wise to shore up any areas of deficiency or unintentional loopholes to produce greater election integrity as a matter of fact, as well as to improve public confidence in those results.
The New York Post reports, “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.” This further takes the wind out of the sails of Joe Biden’s false smear of Republican election integrity laws as “Jim Crow 2.0,” because the Democrat bastion of New York is a huge problem too.
Update 7/7: Adams has been declared the winner of the Democrat primary, which virtually assures he’ll be the next mayor.