NYC Dem Mayoral Candidate Eric Adams Raises Concerns After “100,000-plus” Votes Allegedly Suddenly Appear
Adams took a commanding lead last Tuesday, but his lead dwindled to only 2% as third-place candidate Kathryn Garcia jumped to second place after ranked voting counted.
A new tally of votes shrunk Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams’ lead shrink considerably after rising to first place last Tuesday in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary.
Adams took first place last week after the city took part in the first ranked-choice voting (RCV):
With 82 percent of the results in, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was the first choice of 31.6 percent of those who voted in person on Tuesday or during the early voting period, as New Yorkers chose a leader to steer the city’s reopening and economic recovery.
—
Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, was in second with 22.3 percent; Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, was in third with 19.7 percent. Either would become the city’s first female mayor.
The RCV allows voters to rank five candidates by preference. If no candidate receives 50% of the votes in the first round then “the winner must be decided by examining voters’ secondary choices.” Absentee ballots are also counted so the candidates might not know until mid-July the winner of the primary.
A new tally of RCV votes gives the candidates some suspicious numbers:
Wow. Tight results in the NYC mayoral election (RCV just came out): Kathryn Garcia barely beats Maya Wiley in the penultimate round, then closes most but not all of the gap with Eric Adams in the final round.
Adams 51%, Garcia 49%. A gap of 16K votes.
(120K+ ballots remain.)
— Taniel (@Taniel) June 29, 2021
So now Adams leads Garcia by 15,908 after her YUGE jump.
Adams is not thrilled.
“The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,” stated Adams’ campaign. “We have asked the Board of Election to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the Ranked Choice Voting projection. We remain confident that Eric Adams will be the next mayor of New York because he put together a historic five-borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, more affordable place.”
Eric Adams' statement, which goes there pic.twitter.com/xhYORu3Mqy
— Dana Rubinstein (@danarubinstein) June 29, 2021
Should Adams have concerns? From the New York Times (emphasis mine):
According to the tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She netted 29.3 percent of the vote, just 4,000 votes behind Ms. Garcia, before being eliminated in the 10th round.
The release of Ms. Wiley’s supporters heavily benefited Ms. Garcia in the final tally; either candidate would be New York’s first female mayor, and Ms. Wiley would be the city’s first Black female mayor.
Half of Ms. Wiley’s votes went to Ms. Garcia, 19 percent went to Mr. Adams, and the remainder was not allocated to either.
Ms. Wiley ran well to the left of Ms. Garcia on a number of vital policy matters, including around policing and on some education questions. But Mr. Adams, a former police captain and a relative moderate on several key issues, is a non-starter for many deeply progressive voters who may have preferred Ms. Garcia and her technocratic focus on competence.
I don’t understand how Garcia jumped to second place. The progressives should have picked Wiley as their second choice, right? That’d be like me, a libertarian, choosing AOC as my second choice. It does not make sense.
UPDATED AT 8PM ET: The Board of Elections responded while I ate dinner. They are not helping themselves.
We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report. We are working with our RCV technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred. We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience.
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 29, 2021
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
When will he lose his law license?
What is Adams’s opinion on the Dominion and other controversies surrounding that other election?
Hey Adams, you’re a Democrat, you know how the game is played. Need some votes, “find” some votes
He won’t go there ( with vote fraud charges) will he?
I assume your question is rhetorical. Therefore I’ll ask one of my own….
He’s a democrat isn’t he?
But- but – he’s the wrong kind of democRAT . .
This is too precious. Adams is going to be fraudulently eliminated, mark my words, and it will be by a margin just above the percentage required to trigger a recount. Although I have to say that doing a recount in a “ranked choice” election might be nearly impossible. In fact, what Mr. Adams is going to need is an election AUDIT!
My advice is buy more popcorn!
On the contrary, doing a recount under the single transferable vote system (aka “preferential voting”, “ranked choice”, or “instant runoff”) is just as easy as doing one under the first-past-the-post system. The paper ballots are there, and can either be rescanned or counted by hand, and the preferences can also be allocated by hand. Do you think that in places where this is the normal way that every election is held, they don’t do recounts?!
Heh, the communists can’t even run honest elections in their own primaries.
What is this thing “honest election” and why would the representatives of the proletariat want it when they already know what is best? You sound like a subversive!
How is “ranked choice” voting not unconstitutional on its face? It requires compelled association with political candidates in violation of the first amendment and it violates the free speech clause by compelling political speech in favor of candidates other than the one you prefer.
What in modern times is this “constitutional” that elections are supposedly supposed to follow? Especially in New York?
Subotai Bahadur
Huh? What the HELL are you talking about? You’re babbling and not making any sense at all.
Nothing is being compelled. On the contrary, the voter gets more choices and gets to ensure his vote counts even if his first preference can’t win. It makes “wasted votes” impossible, so nobody needs to vote strategically. It’s the first-past-the-post system that forces people to vote for candidates they don’t prefer, for fear that someone even worse will win.
What ‘1ook votes’ is Adams referring to? There were something like 116k absentee ballots arriving in the five day window post election day to be examined and tallied.
Was that the 100k ballots? Was it ‘newly discovered’ ballots from election day? Was it from provisional ballots being adjudicated?
No, the absentee ballots are not included in this count. They still have to be counted, which makes any preliminary result useless.
It turns out the extra votes came from the electronic equivalent of a stuffed ballot box.
Milhouse,
Appreciate the input and clarification. Though it now appears that in addition to the excess 135k votes resulting from a failure to delete the test data from the machines there may be under counted votes in precincts which strongly supported Adams.
One wonders if, perhaps, ‘test’ votes in other locations was likewise not cleared from the 2020 general election.
Why would they use the names of actual candidates? This seems like it was an unforced error. Had the ‘test’ been conducted with invented names rather than actual names of candidates the error of failure to reset the machines would have been apparent from the beginning.
If Mickey mouse or scrooge Mcduck received tens of thousands of votes immediately on election day then discounting them wouldn’t have impacted the true tally.
As I understand it they wanted to test the actual ballot, to make sure there was nothing wrong with it that would come back to bite them later. There were errors in last year’s election in some places, such as Antrim, MI, because the ballot had been changed at the last minute and the scanners had not been updated to correctly recognize it, so votes were allocated to the candidate whose name had been in that position on the old ballot. So they wanted to avoid that. Fair enough, but forgetting to blank the system afterwards is just incompetent.
Love it. You just have to love it.
Maybe he should give Trump a call. Trump having some experience in this area.
I really wish he would call Trump!
Conspiracy theorist!
White supremacy. Or something.
That’s why I voted against Ranked Choice Voting when it was on the ballot. It’s an invitation to a clown show.
That’s incorrect. It is the most logical and fairest system of voting, and I’m astonished that it has not been adopted everywhere. I was disappointed that it’s only for the primary and won’t be used in November.
This screw-up has nothing to do with the new system and everything to do with the BOE’s basic incompetence.
Within the ranked choice system as applied in NY are voters free to list their preferred candidate for all five rankings?
If not, it would seem to be a conscription of the voter’s franchise where a voter is forced to substitute an alternate to his preferred candidate.
I honestly don’t know if NY requires that or if the voter can designate their choice of candidate on each rank.
Ranked choice could be seen as disenfranchising voters in the latter stages of the process where all five of their candidates have been eliminated.
I am not convinced that these stages should be viewed as one continuous process in a single election rather than a series of sequential and separate elections.
Especially since the later stages do in practice include the ballots of some voters while disregarding the ballots of others.
Does it make since from an election administration viewpoint? Sure. No runoff because the run off is built in. Probably saves costs as well. Neither of which are valid reasons to effectively disenfranchise some voters.
What do you mean? Of course at each stage they are free to list their choice; that’s the whole point. If you mean can they put the same candidate down as their first, second, third, fourth, and fifth choices, of course not. That would make no sense at all. If someone is your first choice then he is not your second choice. Your second choice is your first choice among everyone else. And your third choice is your first choice among everyone other than your first two. Etc. I can’t fathom how anyone has trouble understanding this.
Nobody’s forced to do anything. You don’t have to make a second choice. But you’d be crazy not to. What if your first choice isn’t available. Do you really not care which of the other candidates wins?! Do you really not want a say among them?! If you really don’t, then sure, don’t make a second choice. But most people do have a preference and should be allowed to express it.
That goes quadruple for first-past-the-post, since it disenfranchises everyone whose first choice has been eliminated! At least here you get four more chances to have your say.
But I’m not happy that the choices are limited to five. There’s no good reason for it, except that they’re married to this bubble concept. It would be much simpler and easier if they did it like in Australia, where you simply write a 1 in the box next to your first choice, a 2 next to your second choice, and so on. That way there’s no artificial limit on the number of choices; you can list all the candidates if you like. (In fact in Australia you used to have to number all candidates; but now you can stop whenever you have no more preferences.)
Milhouse,
If a voter is precluded from listing their preferred candidate for each of the five positions and must either select a candidate they don’t wish to support or make no choice, then that’s a problem.
It effectively says ‘you are not allowed to choose your preferred candidate, you must choose a candidate you don’t support or lose your vote’.
Maybe an alternative would be to rank the 14 candidates, first choice =14 votes, last choice =1 vote. Add them up in one iteration. Basically like the top 25 football polls work.
Though I don’t really see why first past the post isn’t acceptable. It’s your State y’all do your thing.
No, it isn’t. It’s literally impossible for a candidate to be both your first choice and your second choice. By definition a second choice means a choice among all other options. You’ve already said you like this guy, but what if you can’t have him? Whom do you like among the others?
That’s what we say at every election, when the person you would most want in the post isn’t on the ballot. And under first-past-the-post we also say it when your preferred candidate is on the ballot, but you’re afraid not enough people will vote for him, so you must either choose someone else or waste your vote and forfeit any say in who ultimately wins.
No, that is not fair or sensible at all. One man, one vote. But that vote should be transferable, so that the voter gets a say at each stage of the runoffs, until it’s down to two candidates.
Milhouse,
IMO the ranked choice system is a solution in search of a problem.
Having said that, it’s the system the people of NY have adopted. Their State, their choice.
Maybe after the rest of us see it in operation for a couple of decades we can come to see things differently.
If you want to see it in operation, not just for a couple of decades but for a century or more, just look at Australia and Ireland. Both countries have been using it that long, for all elections, with complete success, and it never occurs to anyone to vote any other way.
Milhouse,
IMO, the electorate in NY is more reflective of the broader US population than Ireland or Australia.
The test of this system is not whether it works at the the theoretical level but in real world application with all the individual variance among the electorate.
Some people are very focused and thoroughly research the candidates. Some can’t recognize their own candidate’s quotations or policies, mistakenly attributing the policy of another candidate to their own or the reverse.
Australia has mandatory voting requirements for every citizen of voting age. That isn’t compatible with our constitution.
Ireland uses a proportional system + a single transferable vote. Once a candidate has a tally over the quota all additional ballots listing that candidate as the first choice have the vote transferred to the second choice of the voter. The Irish system seems flipping crazy, IMO.
Ranked Choice elections is the perfect vehicle for the Democrat Party fascists. Eric is just too Republican for them and he will lose.
1. That is not true at all. It does not help Democrats any more than Republicans.
2. Adams is not at all Republican. He was woke before anyone. He got where he is by playing the race card. And he joined the NYPD in the first place as an infiltrator for a black supremacist preacher (not Sharpton, but an equivalent). That he is one of the least insane candidates in this year’s mayoral primary is not a compliment to him but an indictment of his competition.
“That [Adams] is one of the least insane candidates in this year’s mayoral primary is not a compliment to him but an indictment of his competition.”
Proving the old saying that the “lesser of competing evils” is still evil. Kind of like the choice between having one arm being cut off and both arms being cut off.
Arrow’s theorem proves that you can’t have a fair voting system no matter what you do. A mathematical impossibility, like a fair way to tax married couples in a system with a progressive tax rate.
Calling Bill Barr. Calling John Durham. Help is only moments away.
If Adams gets cheated out of a win, a lot of voters will be angry. If he then runs on some other line in the Fall against the other Democrat and Republican Sliwa, we might have an interesting race – especially since the other Dem is likely for defunding the police, now a Republican responsibility per the Biden administration.
I am for 100% electoral chaos. If our self-anointed moral and intellectual betters are trying to annihilate each other, there will be a brief spell where they will not concentrate their hatred and fury on us proles so much. It’s the best we can hope for in the Biden* Era.
Chesa Boudin had lost the San Francisco DA race by quite a large margin. Then the “ranked choice” votes came in and the rest is history.
No, he had not lost. He wasn’t the first choice of most voters, but neither was anybody else. But the majority of voters chose him over the alternatives available to them, once their first choices were ruled out. That’s exactly why this is the fairest system possible.
The people have spoken, and now: they will be spoken to, and reminded that they are already spoken for.
Seems you just can’t be the wrong kind of democRAT, even if you’re black, to get elected “fairly” in the Big Rotten Apple these days, if it’s ever been possible. Will we ever learn where these 100k votes came from ?
I can assure everybody that there is no evidence of voting fraud here, none at all, and anybody who claims there is should be chased off Facebook/Twitter/any other social media site we think of.
That’s the rule, right?
Here you go people. The first round voting in the new ranked vote system have been recalled as they have “discovered” that they had not properly cleared a computer system of “test votes” and those were accidentally tallied with the live election numbers. Really, it was just a mistake . . . look over there! Something shiny!!!
https://apnews.com/article/eric-adams-lead-shrinks-nyc-democratic-mayor-primary-0c92450b5dbb57018e2f8e15d8471a97?utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter
Rankled voting system, we’ll tell you who won in a few weeks. Leave us alone. lol
Adams is the “law and order” candidate in that primary.
The mystery has been solved. The BOE did a test run before the primary, with 135,000 test ballots, and they didn’t clear them out of the system. This is the equivalent of a good old fashioned stuffed ballot box.
I am a NYC poll worker, and one of my tasks at my polling site is to open each scanner in the morning, remove the ballot box and look inside it to visually verify that it’s empty, put it back inside its compartment, lock it with a key, and seal it with a numbered plastic seal. So I know there are no stuffed ballot boxes at my site. It seems the BOE is too incompetent to do the same on its tallying system.
Incompetence on behalf of the BOE or malice? I find it odd that *all* of the ‘test’ ballots (or at least a vast majority) were marked for one candidate they don’t like. Still, the modern rule is we are forbidden to discuss such heretical ideas, so all hail the victor (whoever the BOE decides that is.)
There is no indication that this was so, and it’s extremely unlikely.
Sorry, Democrat, but all elections are sacred and above reproach! Questioning the integrity of an election is a cancellable offense!
Survey says… suck it!