The electoral commission of the city of New York announced yesterday evening that it had found “discrepancies” in the counting of votes in the Democratic primaries ahead of the elections for the choice of the first citizen of the Big Apple. The announcement throws the Democratic primaries into chaos, hours after the publication of new interim results that highlight an increasingly intense contest between Democratic candidates for the post of mayor. According to data published yesterday, in fact, Eric Adams is ahead of just two percentage points – about 15,900 votes – over his opponent Kathryn Garcia.
A few hours after the publication of these results, however, the Electoral Commission announced in a statement that it had undertaken checks on the counting of votes, and removed the electoral records from its website.
During the night, the Commission published a second statement, explaining that 135,000 “test” votes carried out to verify the voting systems before the actual primary had not been eliminated from the system, and had been erroneously counted in the context of the provisional results. .
The primary of the Democratic Party was held on June 22, 2021 from which the name of the progressive candidate for the leadership of the city of New York will come out, after eight years and two terms of the mayor dem Bill De Blasio. The voting operations ended in the evening, but the electoral system risks extending the counting and scrutiny of the ballots by several days. For the first time, in fact, the citizens of the Big Apple have used the multi-preference system for the primaries, in which they will be able to indicate up to five candidates in descending order of preference. In other words, in column “1” the name of the preferred candidate will go, in “2” the name of the second choice, and so on up to column “5”. In this way, the candidate who does not reach the 50 percent of the necessary preferences to be chosen in the first round will aim for the recovery of the votes as best second choice and so on. This system is also used elsewhere in the United States for administrative elections, with the exception of Maine where it is also adopted for state competitions.
Contending for the democratic leadership in New York, historically a fort of progressives as well as the most populous city in the country, are Andrew Yang and, above all, the president of the city hall of Brooklyn, Eric Adams, and Kathryn Garcia, at the helm of New York health care until to last year. According to the “New York Times”, given the electoral composition of the city, the Democrat winner of the primary is almost certain to be elected mayor next November. After voting closes, election officials will have to wait for tens of thousands of mailing papers to arrive, which could contribute to further delaying operations. Only the first choice votes of New Yorkers, those in column “1”, will be counted immediately, but their other preferences could potentially be decisive. “Democracy takes time and every vote counts,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, an election organization.
“It is worth waiting for accurate and fair election results,” he told the NYT.