The New York City Board of Elections allegedly made a serious error in counting votes in the recent Democrat mayoral primary race and has now removed the election results from its website.
“The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly,” The New York Times reported. “By late Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available ‘starting on June 30.'”Shortly after the the NYC Board of Elections posted the results, it released a statement on Twitter stating that a “discrepancy” had happened that it was working to fix.
“We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report,” the elections board said in a statement. “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 NYC Board of Elections then released a longer statement, writing:
The Board of Elections conducts rigorous and mandatory pre-qualification testing for every election. It has been determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System (EMS). EMS produces Cast Vote Records (CVR) from ballot images. RCV software uses the CVR to produce unofficial results.
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. 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 record will be re-generated and the RCV rounds will be re-tabulated.
The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported.
Two local NYC journalists reported that the error involved the elections board not removing a large number of test votes from a computer.
“Elections 2.0: Sources tell me the Board of Elections is going back to the drawing board and running corrected ranked-choice numbers tomorrow,” Spectrum News Political Director Bob Hardt said. “About 130,000 ‘votes’ were part of a test-run that were never cleared from a computer.”
“The [NYC Board of Elections] forgot to take out tens of thousands of practice ballots out of the system before running the RCV simulation today, which resulted in the ‘discrepancies,'” reporter Juan Manuel Benitez tweeted.
This report has been updated to include additional information.
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