The BOE Retabulates its Initial Election Results After Adams Notices 100,000-Vote Discrepancy

 By Yehudit Garmaise

     The NYC Board of Elections (BOE) has retracted its initial vote count from last week's mayoral primary after what may have been premature announcements on Election Day and after processing 11 rounds of ranked-choice voting (RCV).

     Although in the days following the June 22 mayoral primary, Mayor Bill de Blasio commended the BOE for a job well done, in the days that preceded the 2020 presidential election, he said many times that the BOE, which many have described as an outdated and perhaps incompetent agency, needed to be completely restructured.

     The BOE pulled its vote count tonight after frontrunner Eric Adams noticed that earlier today the BOE released results from 941,832 votes, while on Election Day on June 22, the BOE only revealed the percentages of first choice winners from the results of 799,827 votes.

     “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. “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.”

     In response, the BOE, using an alphabet of confusing bureaucratic acronyms, “determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the ‘Election Management System,’” which produces ‘Cast Vote Records (CVR) to produce unofficial results for RCV.’

      “When the CVR were extracted for the first pull of RCV results, it included both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records.”

      The BOE, which “apologized for the error” and wants to “ensure the most accurate up-to-date results are reported,” said that the agency will regenerate votes and retabulate New Yorkers’ ranked-choices.