One Chance
Some organizations and individuals have one chance to get actions and statements right. If they declare a “mulligan”, they lose credibility, which is hard to win back. That’s the situation in which the New York Board of Elections finds itself this morning. It botched the count for the Democratic primary for mayor. The board included 135,000 test results which were never supposed to be in the final count. There is no explanation for how it made the mistake but today, politicians and media on all sides are blasting its incompetence. The board won’t live this down for a long time. Now it has to remove the faux votes and recalculate rank choice voting. And, if a candidate should lose but be close to winning, the board will have to go through a second vetting of its results with lawyers hovering on all sides. No one will believe its final count unless the spread is huge. That’s a pity in a year when local election authorities nationwide have come under scrutiny by Republicans who claim fraud in the 2020 election. Their argument will be if it can happen in New York, then why not anywhere else?
Leave a Reply