America is experiencing a veritable Groundhog Day, which is now likely to be repeated at every election. The first major electoral contest since the presidential election – the Democratic Party primaries in New York – has turned into a vote-counting scandal
Voting in the Democratic mayoral primary ended a week ago. The local electoral commission did not easily determine the winner of the first round – it was Brooklyn Borough Leader Eric Adams, an old-school Democrat who is running for mayor with a “law and order” agenda.
But he only got 31.7 per cent, and you need more than half the votes to win a landslide. So the electoral commissions then engaged in a multi-day tabulation of who voters chose as their second mayoral candidate, a lower priority. A separate item with such a question was on the ballot papers.
The final results of the election have still not been finalised. Today, journalists have learned that the local scorers mistakenly counted at least 135,000 “test” ballots, which had nothing to do with the actual votes of the voters choosing their mayoral candidate.
The New York City Election Commission was forced to admit its mistake and hastily set about recounting all the ballots. The official results may now take several weeks to be finalised. The mass “postal vote” coupled with the sloppiness of the tally keepers has turned yet another election into a circus circus.
Let me remind you that Biden was able to win the November elections with 43,000 votes in three states: Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin. And now it turns out that individual states can quietly muddle through hundreds of thousands of votes – and pretend as if the election is OK.
The electoral chaos in New York gives Eric Adams a reason to accuse the party establishment of trying to steal victory from him. The liberals can’t stand Adams: a retired policeman who proposes to strengthen law enforcement amid rampant crime doesn’t fit the current narrative at all.
But most importantly, the American public’s hopes that the scandals of the 2020 elections were just an aberration and would not happen again have not been fulfilled. And not surprisingly, against this backdrop, the crisis of confidence in the very institution of elections in the United States is only intensifying.
Malek Dudakov