The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City was thrown into a state of confusion Tuesday when election officials retracted their latest report on the vote count after realizing it had been corrupted by test data never cleared from a computer system.
The bungle was a black mark on New York City's first major foray into ranked choice voting and seemed to confirm worries that the city's Board of Elections, which is jointly run by Democrats and Republicans, was unprepared to implement the new system.
- Some people here don't want Adams to win, but he wasn't pulling a trump by disagreeing with the results, they just fucked up and it's rather embarrassingThat data had indicated that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police captain who would be the city's second Black mayor, had lost much of his lead and was ahead of former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 16,000 votes.
Then the Board of Elections tweeted that it was aware of "a discrepancy" in its report on ranked choice voting results. It didn't initially explain what that discrepancy was, even as it pulled the data from its website.
Just before 10:30 p.m. it released a statement saying that 135,000 ballot images it had put into its computer system for testing purposes had never been cleared.
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