New York City Mayor: An International Joke
Also, A Mea Culpa
Well, this election is officially off the rails.
We’ll get this out of the way - yes, I wrongly thought Kathryn Garcia couldn’t make up enough ground to win in New York based on incorrect assumptions, and whether she wins or not, that was incorrect on my end. I got it wrong, and I’m sorry. I plainly just didn't expect the kind of coalescing around Garcia as an anti-Adams as we saw. Should I have been less cocky? Of course I should have, that's why I'm apologizing. Now, will she end up being the Mayor of New York? Well, that’s harder to know, and this is complicated, so bear with me here.
Based on the vote counts we have right now, Kathryn Garcia is the favourite to win if there are no more (or, functionally no more) in person votes left to count. If she is only down close to 10k votes - assuming the dummy votes come out and that is the confirmed state of the count, she should win on absentees. The problem with that sentence is the condition, because we have no idea if that is true or not. Dave Wasserman has found about 500 precincts, almost exclusively in pro-Adams areas, where less votes were cast compared to 2017’s barely contested primary. If that’s a sign of undercounting of ballots, then the hill Garcia needs to climb on absentees could be far higher, complicating any attempt to know what might happen. Throw in the uncertain number of emergency and provisional votes that are still outstanding, and this vote count is a mess.
I won’t venture to guess who is favoured right now, because I plainly don’t know. If there are an immense amount of votes left for Adams, the hill may be too big for Garcia to get it back on absentees, but there may not be enough pro-Adams votes left out to make it big enough. Again, if the results as of now hold, and there is minimal to no in person voting left except provisionals and emergency votes, then Garcia should be the clear winner. But I have no idea whether that is true or not, or whether that can be trusted. I have no reason to trust the New York City Board of Elections, and they have shown that again this week.
On Tuesday, nearly 140k dummy votes were added to the count because they forgot to separate their dummy data used to confirm they could do the Ranked Choice Voting count properly, and it basically took Twitter to notice the changes. They’re still unable and unwilling to explain how on earth that happened, but more importantly, the BOE is a hotbed of patronage and corruption at the best of times, and they singularly do not know how to conduct elections. Last year saw the same thing - I remember a conversation with someone at DDHQ about the state of the New York primary vote counts, and the contempt dripping from him at the mere mention of the state was palpable. It’s a mess, and nobody cares to fix it because New York is a safe state. That has to change.
It is terrible to write what I’m about to, but I am no longer sure that the winner of this election will have been the one that the voters intended to elect, whether Adams or Garcia win. It is possible that the final result ends up being so clear that there is no question, but it is hard to believe that this vote count could be universally accepted given the myriad of problems with it and the complete clown car calamity that the process has been. It’s immensely clear that whoever loses this election will want a full accounting and audit of the results, and they should be granted one - but even beyond that, it is hard to say that these results are to be trusted when the people in charge of conducting the election are self-evidently moronic.
This election has become a joke internationally, and while it is trite to say that if this system of election administration was being done in a third world country the US would invade, it is the case that those kinds of elections usually have the word sham in front of them. The NYC Mayor’s election is a sham, but not of the creation of the candidates involved. It is unfathomable that this calamity has taken place, and if this system is not reformed in time for the 2022 elections in the state, then every single person in New York state politics needs to be fired. This is a completely unacceptable way to conduct an election, and at this point, it is undermining public trust in the results. For the sake of democracy, may the official result end up being so overwhelming either way that this doesn’t end up in court, whoever wins - because otherwise, this could get very, very ugly.