New York’s Board of Elections keeps finding new definitions of the word “fail.”
The group that bought voting machines that didn’t work when it was too humid, that couldn’t keep track of its own technology, that disqualified more than 80,000 mail-in ballots in the 2020 primaries, admitted Tuesday that — surprise — it messed up the first calculation of ranked-choice voting.
The BOE released results that showed Eric Adams with a roughly 15,000-vote lead over Kathryn Garcia. But hold on: The total number of in-person votes was 140,000 more than on Primary Day.
Incredibly, it turns out, those were mostly test ballots that were not cleared from the system before the real vote.
“We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report,” the BOE said, hours after it had already released the figures.
The official results of the mayoral primaries aren’t expected until July 12, after all absentee ballots are tallied, so there’s plenty of time to count and double-count and triple-count. But it won’t change the fact that the BOE is an embarrassment. It’s a group that has resisted reform and change even as our elected officials sanctimoniously lecture other states about voting rights.
“We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience,” the BOE wrote Tuesday evening.
Sorry, we’re fresh out of it.
