Is Questioning Election Results a ‘Threat to Our Democracy’ When Democrats Do It?
“All three candidates who are still in the running in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary have filed legal actions seeking the right to review the ongoing ranked choice vote tally.”
The Democrat primary for the New York City mayoral race is a mess. Candidate Eric Adams raised concerns last week after more than 100,000 ballots mysteriously appeared and was mocked by some people for it, but then he turned out to be right.
Now all of the candidates still in the running want to be able to review ballots. Weren’t we told that questioning the outcome of elections is a threat to our democracy? I’m pretty sure we were.
The Associated Press reports:
NYC mayoral contenders file lawsuits seeking ballot review
All three candidates who are still in the running in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary have filed legal actions seeking the right to review the ongoing ranked choice vote tally.
Civil rights attorney Maya Wiley filed a lawsuit Thursday in state court in Brooklyn seeking to preserve her right to challenge the election results and asking for all of the ballots that were “cast or attempted to be cast” to be saved.
“This is a wide open race and as is standard procedure, my campaign filed a petition to preserve the right to challenge the results should we believe it is necessary,” Wiley said in a statement Friday.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and former city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia filed similar legal actions on Wednesday. That was the day after New York City’s Board of Elections posted vote totals for the June 22 primary that erroneously included test data and then retracted them.
Revised vote counts posted Wednesday showed Adams, a former police captain and state senator, leading Garcia by 14,755 votes. Wiley was practically tied with Garcia, falling just 347 votes behind in the ranked choice analysis.
Part of the problem here is that they’re using ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is like Common Core math. At some point, a progressive looked at something that’s very simple and decided they could improve it by making it more complicated.
The candidates are already signalling that they may sue over the results. Will they be accused of being a threat to our democracy?
Tim Balk writes at the New York Daily News:
Maya Wiley files legal paperwork to challenge NYC mayoral election, if desired
Following the New York City Board of Elections ballot bungle, mayoral candidate Maya Wiley filed a lawsuit on Thursday night aimed at preserving her right to a recount in the city’s Democratic primary.
Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor de Blasio, submitted the court papers ahead of a Friday deadline to file such a suit after the June 22 primary, which remains unsettled due to a long wait for the tallying of absentee ballots.
The eight-page complaint, which was filed in Kings County Supreme Court, said the intention of the litigation is to preserve the right “to correct errors that have occurred, are occurring, or may occur” in the recording of election results.
Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, filed similar suits on Wednesday.
What a train wreck.
No matter who wins here, there are going to be lots of people who don’t trust the outcome. I can’t wait to see the media decide that questioning election results is acceptable again.
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They should all be banned from social media for suggesting such a thing. Sarc
Leftists do remarkably well arguing both sides at once explaining how their right on both sides.
Of course they’re right. They are always right, just like my wife says she is.
Does your wife like to read LI? Asking for a friend.
I can’t find the reference, but I read somewhere in the past few weeks about Democrat A whining that Republican B needed to be censured or expelled from the House or Senate for contesting the 2020 election under some rule or other; and Republican B pointing out that in the 2016 election, Democrat A was the first person to stand up and contest that election under the very same rule.
Back in college psychology, I was taught that a toad’s eye literally cannot see food insects until they move.* I think of this mechanism often when I see how regularly Democrats engage in hypocrisy with zero apparent self-awareness whatsoever.
*(The “settled science” may have changed on this in the meanwhile, as I can find no reference to the claim with a cursory web search.)
The problem with so-called settled science is that it is not settled.
Came across it cleaning out my mailbox. It was from my own Rep:
On March 10, 2021, in spite of evidence to the contrary, Representative [Pramila]Jayapal [WA-07] filed an ethics complaint against Congressman Gosar [Az-04] alleging that Congressman Gosar’s actions on January 6, 2021, particularly in objecting to the seating of electors, violated one or more rules of ethics. Indeed, Representative Jayapal ignored her own objection in 2017 to the seating of electors for President Trump in the filing of her 2021 complaint. On June 11, 2021, the House Committee on Ethics rejected the Jayapal Complaint.
In his formal response (which is strong, comprehensive, uncompromising, and quite worth reading) he points out that “unlike Ms. Jayapal in 2016, I had a Senator, as required by law, join my objection.” He also demolishes on the record numerous lies Democrats are telling about January 6 and reminds the House that the only actual violent death was Ashli Babbitt’s. A truly stirring read.
Gosar is now under attack because reportedly he’s agreed to appear at some event at which Nick Fuentes is also to appear. Supposedly this makes Gosar an antisemite. Now I’m not thrilled with his decision not to boycott the event, the mere fact that he has made that decision doesn’t make him an antisemite. All it means is that his priorities are different from mine.
I will say that anyone who said nothing when Al Sharpton was given a place of honor at the DNC and nobody walked out, anyone who does not accuse every single Democrat who kisses Sharpton’s ring of antisemitism, has no business leveling such an accusation at Gosar over his failure to protest a nothing pipsqueak like Fuentes. Sharpton is comparable to Goebbels; Fuentes is more like Mosley, if that.
“settled science” – Howie Carr, columnist for the Boston Herald, defined it as: “Whatever a moonbat feels at that particular moment, that settles it.”
Nonsense. There’s nothing “progressive” about it, and it’s not at all complicated. As far as I can tell the average voter understands it very well, it’s the BOE who I suspect don’t understand it, and make it sound complicated when they try to explain it.
In Australia and Ireland, where it’s been used for all elections, at all levels, for the past century or more, even little children understand it easily. It never occurs to anyone to vote any other way. And it helps both major parties equally, depending on which one the majority actually prefer when the choice is eventually narrowed down to just those two. What it really means is that people are not forced to vote for the lesser of two evils, they merely have to put the lesser evil second-last and the greater evil last.
Ditto. Not only untrue, but unfair. The Libertarian Party, for example (hardly progressive!) has espoused RCV for decades.
The LP suffers from the problem that its voters tend to think, “I’d really like to vote for Joe Libertarian, but I’m afraid if I don’t vote for Donald Populist, then Hillary Marxist will win.” With RCV, they are free to vote for Joe Libertarian in first place and Donald Populist in second place, and Hillary not at all. Then the first round balloting results shows the true popularity of each of the candidates’ platforms to the American public, while allowing the voter to make nuanced preference choices below that. A hoped-for side-effect is that if the “competitive” parties see a significant number of first-round votes to a party other than theirs, they might move their own policies in that direction to capture those votes. Keep in mind that the Democrat platform now contains nearly the entirety of the old Socialist and Communist platforms of 100 years ago, so that happens.
Every reader in NYS should send this article to the two US Senators, their Congressman, state senator and assemblymen.
Um, I’m pretty sure Schumer, Gillibrand, and my local communists know all about it, and don’t care.
Why does it not surprise me that you are “all ‘comment’ and no actions” ? …
You are an idiot. What possible value could there be in sending this article to Schumer or Gillibrand?
Ah, but you’re the same moron, aren’t you, who thinks that a constitutional amendment doesn’t amend the constitution. So nothing you say is of any value.
No big deal. This easily meets the Babylon Bee’s 10th rule for fair and honest elections: The Democrat won.
Note the whole allegation of wrongdoing in a courtroom and how differently things go if you are going to avail yourself of the court system instead of trying only court of public opinion.
These Democrat candidates understand that the worst that could happen if they bring an allegation to court and it is shot down on evidence grounds is they are back where they started.
When will we eliminate absentee balloting? If voting is so fucking important, why make it easier for people to avoid dragging their fat asses down to the polls and voting in person?
Don’t get me started on “computerized voting.” It’s tailor-made for stealing votes or having them mysteriously disappear.
Say that the military stationed over seas, or people who don’t want to waste hours queuing.
“It’s tailor-made for stealing votes or having them mysteriously disappear” its a part paper system so its checkable, there is little to no evidence that fraudulent votes have slipped through the net so to speak.
If you’re talking about NYC, we use paper ballots that are fed into a scanner, so it’s certainly not “tailor-made for stealing votes or having them mysteriously disappear”. The old mechanical system we had for decades before this was exactly that. There was no way to audit the machines, and rumors were rife about them.
The main defect of the new system is in fact not in the computerized side but in the paper side. When it’s humid or raining the paper ballots warp and the scanners jam.
As for absentee ballots, I agree that they should be greatly restricted, and not made a free-for-all as they are now, with “I’m afraid of the covids” allowed as an excuse. They can’t be completely eliminated, but we can go a long way toward that by providing more opportunities for in-person voting to people who have a good reason why they can’t come to their local precinct on election day. One idea is to have the facility for any polling place to print out the ballot for any other polling place, so people can vote in person from anywhere, with all the security advantages of that; the ballots would then be treated as “absentee”, but they’d be secure, or rather as secure as normal in-person votes, because they’re in the election boards’ custody the whole time. There could also be mobile voting booths taken to hospitals and nursing homes, complete with an election judge and partisan observers, so people can vote from their hospital beds with the same security as they would at a normal polling place.
“One idea is to have the facility for any polling place to print out the ballot for any other polling place, so people can vote in person from anywhere, with all the security advantages of that; the ballots would then be treated as “absentee”, but they’d be secure, or rather as secure as normal in-person votes, because they’re in the election boards’ custody the whole time.” Interesting idea, does it scale up in a cost effective way?