Municipalities in New York in disarray after miscounting during primaries

New York’s mayoral elections appear to be descending into chaos. The authorities have admitted that they mistakenly counted about 135,000 additional ballot papers, in addition to the 800,000 votes already cast, during the Democratic primaries from which the next mayor is supposed to be out.

On Tuesday, the city’s Electoral Office released the preliminary results, according to which former cop Eric Adams, who had so far been nine points ahead of his closest stalker, is now ahead with Catherine Garcia, 51% to 49% before the mail-in vote counted.

A few hours later, the results were withdrawn and office A was called “Difference” in the count. Then he said he forgot to remove from the count the test reports that were used to ensure the proper functioning of the system.

The officials have apologized for that ” Error “ They are said to have removed test reports from the new count, without publishing updated preliminary results.

New voting system

This failure caused an uproar in New York, where the election office already had a terrible reputation, being regularly accused of incompetence and complacency.

“This is a mistake (…) It’s not just a failure to count votes properly, it’s the result of generations of failures that have never been dealt with before.”Maya Wiley, the progressive candidate who came in second on the strength of the first preliminary results, published on election night, tweeted June 22.

The failure reverberates further as New York tests for the first time a new voting system, the so-called “preferential” voting (“Classified Choice”, in English), which allows up to five names to appear on a single ballot, listed in order of preference.

During the counting process, the candidate with the lowest ranking in the total number of votes is eliminated and the second choice is now counted for the voters who placed him first. The process is then repeated until the candidate reaches 50% of the vote.