"Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a Black or Latino candidate from winning the race.... To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process — which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure — would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adams’s backers and others already urging a new referendum on it.... According to the now-withdrawn tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She finished closely behind Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, before being eliminated in the penultimate round of the preliminary exercise. After the count of in-person ballots last week, Ms. Garcia had trailed Ms. Wiley by about 2.8 percentage points...."
Wiley and Adams are the 2 black candidates.* If they are shut out after multi-round computer shuffling and Garcia gets the nomination, I don't see how people are going to believe what happened was legit. And the Democrats will have themselves to blame, since they've been leaning into characterizing everything that happens within the structure of voting as racist.
The top-rated comment in the NYT is:
Please oh please do not make it sound like ranked choice is somehow rigged! The old way meant people who the majority did *not* want could win elections because of multiple candidates dividing the vote. Ranked choice makes it so that a majority is in favor of the winner, even if that person wasn’t their first choice. Voters voted for this process. Eric Adams and fans, do not follow Trump into the moral void and start undermining results just because you don’t like them.
Too late for that sort of wishful thinking. This is a bed Democrats made for themselves.
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* They're the 2 black candidates among the leading vote winners. Among the many, many candidates, there were at least 2 others who are black.
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13 comments:
Dave Begley writes:
Is so, so stupid that only a liberal could come up with it and love it.
Only one person can be elected to an office. It is not a team thing. There is a winner and loser. Purely binary. The reason libs like it is the fact that they hate the fact that there are losers in life.
Alex writes:
My theory for a while has been that opposition to the audits is driven less by fear that they’ll expose fraud (although that may be the case) and more by fear that the audits will expose how elections are managed by corrupt, incompetent nitwits who have spent decades cutting corners, ignoring election laws, and mishandling ballots. Stuff like this has always happened, it just never was so blatant before, and too often candidates simply accepted it. That seems to be changing.
Wayne writes:
Obviously ranked choice voting does not provide the correct result if all the voters are racist and/or misogynist. Or likely some other “-ist’s” as well. Or if the racist/misogynist candidates form an alliance to game the ranked choice system. Or maybe counting test ballots impacts the results. What could go wrong?
LA_Bob writes:
Of course, none of this was foreseeable. No, no, not at all. Totally transparent from proposal to passage in 2019. I wonder how few people really understand how the process was intended to work. And how even fewer people understand whether it works as intended.
Come to think of it, it was the same Christina Greer of Fordham University, quoted yesterday in the Kamala Harris / Michael Jackson post, who had previously intoned on the subject of ranked-choice voting: "It's not that complicated." Indeed.
And that comment about not following Trump into the moral void? Ho ho ho. Election shenanigans and the "moral void" long, long predate Donald Trump.
Like Russ Feingold said many years ago in a losing cause. "It's not over until we win." Losers fight dirty.
Amadeus 48 writes:
As with the 2020 presidential election, it is hard to evaluate what happened in the NYC election without knowing what happened. This is all made obscure by voting rules that have become over-complicated and result in opportunities for manipulation.
Here’s a plan for NYC’s mayoral primaries: 1. Have an election where voters must present themselves at the polls on election day with at least the sort of ID they should present to go upstairs in a high rise building. No absentee voting, no early voting. 2. If no one gets a majority in the first round, have a subsequent run-off between the two highest vote getters in the first round. 3. Have paper ballots that can be audited by hand if necessary. Absentee voting and early voting are mechanisms for shenanigans.
I had a lot of experience with preferential ballots in a church organization where lay people were elected to service positions. It works OK where there are open nominations in a defined group of members, but it takes a long time and those who don’t want to serve must withdraw early in the process. This hits me as a caucus procedure projected onto America’s largest city. Remember how well the Dem caucuses worked in Iowa in 2020? Do we have a winner yet?
Gavin emails to make this great point:
My comment would be that this voting fiasco of 135k "test votes" in NYC shows exactly why many voters want voting integrity laws and how Trump's claim of a "stolen" 2020 election has traction. How can an error of this magnitude even happen? Our voting process in this country has become a laughing stock.
Barbara B writes:
This reminds me of a co-ed book club I was in for 20 years. At the end of the evening we would get down to the business of deciding on our next book. People would toss out ideas, sometimes with a little sales pitch. The host would read the room to get it down to three choices and then we would vote. And we ended up with everyone's THIRD choice. Every time. First and second choices were too polarizing. Full disclosure: we were hammered by the end of the night and we all really liked to talk. We never did read "Lolita" but it was nominated for years.
MikeR writes:
Huh. Amazing. This reminds me of the state caucuses, except that you have to decide everything beforehand.
Really, every voter should be allowed to turn in a decision tree. "If more than 40% vote for __ and __ combined, and less than 27% for __, take the left branch..."
Ken writes:
2 points. 1, remember it's a party primary, not a general election. Shpuld omly matter to Democrats.
2, the alternatives are either plurality wins or run-off. Neither necessarily better. I imagine the sophistication of today's computers was appealing, but GIGO.
I'll say:
1. It would apply to Republicans too, but there were only 2 Republican candidates.
2. Everyone knows the Democrat will win, so what happens in the Democratic party ends up being the answer for everyone. And everyone has to deal with how their fellow citizens feel about whether the process was fair.
Ted writes:
Without even knowing what this article was about, I was struck by the use of that increasingly popular phrase, "suggested without evidence."
First of all, how much evidence do you really need to "suggest" that an "apparent" ranked-choice alliance "could" amount to an "attempt" to suppress votes? That's an awful lot of weasel words.
Secondly, when the writers say "without evidence," you might think they mean: "We, the journalists of the New York Times, have investigated this issue fully, and have determined that there isn't enough evidence to support this suggestion." But it seems more likely that what they really mean is: "We disagree with this suggestion -- and because the people making it haven't gift-wrapped it in irrefutable proof, we're adding a disclaimer to make sure our readers don't believe it either."
And if it's the latter, how can they know there isn't evidence if they haven't looked for it? Isn't that a reporter's entire job?
Iain writes:
"Without evidence" in a Times headline is certainly a tell: it's reserved for candidates they oppose, if not outright despise. I don't recall them saying that Stacey Abrams claimed "without evidence" to have won the governorship of Georgia, or that Hillary Clinton claimed "without evidence" that Donald Trump stole the 2016 election, but those headlines would have been at least as accurate as any they ran about Trump or Eric Adams. Yet they wonder why we don't trust them.
Stephen writes:
"...[Revised] Preliminary results posted on the embattled election agency’s website showed Adams narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia, 358,521 votes (51.1 percent} to 343,766 (48.9 percent).
In an ironic twist, the percentages are identical to the ones reported Tuesday, when Garcia overtook Maya Wiley to vault into second place pending the counting of absentee ballots.
But the vote spread between Adams and Garcia shrank to 14,755 from 15,908."
"...But the corrected count is far from complete, with more than 125,000 mail-in, absentee ballots that arrived ahead of Tuesday’s deadline still being counted."
'...Also Wednesday, The Post exclusively revealed that the BOE’s executive director, Mike Ryan, has been on medical leave since March amid a battle with stage 4 cancer.
BOE Deputy Executive Director Dawn Sandow, a Bronx Republican political appointee, has been filling in for Ryan, but a fellow GOP official described her as a “disaster,” adding, “She isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.”
Sandow was not at a Bronx address listed in public records, when The Post tried to reach her for comment, and didn’t answer the door of an address listed in Rockland County, though a neighbor said she lived there.'
[The Peter Principle is apparently still alive and thriving in the NYC bureaucracy.]
https://nypost.com/2021/06/30/mayoral-re-tally-comes-down-to-adams-again-topping-garcia/
https://nypost.com/2021/06/30/elections-board-handed-to-unqualified-no-2-before-mayoral-primary-source/
R.T. O'Dactyl writes:
The methods used in this and in previous elections -- first-past-the-post ("radio buttons, pick one") winner-take-all voting and ranked-choice ("Australian ballot") voting, are not the only alternatives. There's a simpler, more transparent method: approval voting. Give the voter a list of candidates with check boxes and the instruction "Vote for the candidates of whom you approveu. If several candidates are acceptable, check their boxes and no others. If only one candidate is acceptable, mark only that box. If no candidates are acceptable, leave all boxes blank." Whoever has the highest tally of all votes when all ballots have been counted is the winner.
The advantages are: It's easy to do. It's simple to understand. There's no recondite multiple-round process of elimination. It gives immediate results (assuming the tallying has been honest and timely). No arguments about "overvotes" and "undervotes." The only disadvantage that I can see is that the integrity and chain of custody of the ballots has to be scrupulously preserved, otherwise there's a risk of unauthorized individuals *adding* votes to previously marked ballots. But then, we've already discovered that other methods have integrity problems, haven't we?
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