RUTHFULLY YOURS

Don’t you dare question the integrity of the 2020 presidential election because Democrats can always be trusted to run fair, honest and transparent elections. That’s the narrative and you’re expected to stick with it, even in the face of then nation’s biggest, richest, most sophisticated city obviously bungling the race to elect its next mayor.

It’s so blatant that even the New York Times recognizes the problem and applies the word “chaos.” Katie Glueck writes:

The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”

The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.

But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”

By 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.”

Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.

The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched contest into a new period of uncertainty at a consequential moment for the city.

While it took Ms. Glueck and her editors 5 paragraphs to get to the key fact that 135,000 extra ballots showed up, the New York Post’s coverage was (predictably) more pointed:

The Democratic primary race for mayor was thrown into chaos Tuesday as the city Board of Elections appeared to have botched the count amid the city’s first ranked-choice election — adding 135,000 pre-election “test” ballots that hadn’t been cleared from a computer.

According to a BOE statement Tuesday night, “it has determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System . . .

“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported.”

Preliminary results released earlier in the day showed a total of 941,832 ballots cast for mayor, an increase of more than 140,000 from the 799,827 that were counted on June 22, the day of the primary.

The glaring discrepancy at first went unnoticed until it was flagged by front-runner Eric Adams.

“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,” an Adams spokesman said. [emphasis added]

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. When only the first choices of voters were tabulated, retired police captain Eric Adams, running as a law-and-order candidate took such a big lead that Democrats started soiling themselves and came up with the ridiculously laughable  argument that it is Republicans trying to defund the police.

But when the second choices started being counted:

The unofficial results from the first round of voting last week put Adams ahead of Maya Wiley, a former counsel to outgoing Mayor de Blasio, by 253,234 (31.66 percent) 177,722 (22.22 percent).

But Tuesday’s unofficial results, after a total of 11 rounds of ranked-choice counting, had Adams narrowly leading former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia by 368,898 (51.1 percent) to 352,990 or 51.1 (48.9 percent), with Wiley and 10 other candidates eliminated.

A total of 219,944 ballots “with no choices left” were listed as “inactive.” But the city still has yet to count more than 124,000 absentee ballots sent by mail

Why, nobody would ever cheat using mail in ballots, would they?

Plus, there are still more rounds of ranked choice calcuations that are so complex that it will be weeks more until results are known.

If Adams ends up losing, the Democrats’ best hope to salvage their reputation as soft on crime as our cities endure skyrocketing violence will be lost. Worse yet, he might even take it into his head to complain about the fairness and integrity of the election in which he was defeated.

Democrats may be amoral and sneaky, but they aren’t geniuses.