Discrepancy with test ballots disrupts NYC mayoral primary

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A failure to clear roughly 135,000 test ballot images from an election management system led to significant confusion over the status of preliminary vote tallies in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, the city’s Board of Elections said Tuesday evening.

Staff have removed the test ballot images from the system and will re-tabulate the results, the board said in a Twitter statement, adding it “apologizes for the error.”

The elections board pleaded for patience earlier Tuesday evening after acknowledging a large discrepancy in the number of votes reported in a recent update and the number reported after the initial count on the day of the June 22 primary.

The board on Tuesday reported that 941,832 ranked-choice votes had been cast for mayor during last week’s primary, the first such election in which the ranked-choice method was used, while 799,827 were initially counted and reported on June 22, according to the New York Post.

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“We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report,” the election board wrote in an initial response to the discrepancy on Twitter. “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.”

The discrepancy, which led to the elections board removing the vote tallies from its website on Tuesday evening, shrunk candidate Eric Adams’s lead by about 7 points and moved Kathryn Garcia up from third place to second in the preliminary totals.

“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,” Adams said in a statement before the board’s update. “We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the Ranked Choice Voting projection.”


The board insisted in its explanation that it “conducts rigorous and mandatory pre-qualification testing for every election,” adding officials determined “ballot images used for testing were not cleared” from the election management system.

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“When the cast vote records were extracted for the first pull of RCV results, it included both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the board said. “Board staff has removed all test ballot images from the system and will upload election night results, cross-referencing against election night reporting software for verification. The cast vote will be re-generated and the RCV rounds will be re-tabulated.”

Adams leads the race, according to current unofficial numbers, though absentee ballots have not yet been tabulated.

The full results of the election may not be available until mid-July, as officials move beyond “No. 1” choice calculations, which the current results reflect, and on to consider how many times individual candidates were ranked as voters’ second and third choices.

The general election, which will pick a successor to Mayor Bill de Blasio, is set to take place in November.

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