De Blasio Lambast Board of Elections over botched mayoral count, calls for ‘complete recanvass’

 

Mayor de Blasio Wednesday slammed the bothered city Board of Elections for botching the mayoral vote count by adding dummy votes to the official count.

“Yet again, the quintessential structural flaws of the Board of Elections are on display,” de Blasio stated in a statement.

He demanded the embattled board carry out an “an instant and complete recanvass” of the mayoral vote count, which was carried out using the new ranked choice vote casting system.

“The record range of voters who turned out this election deserve nothing less,” the mayor added.

Hizzoner renewed his calls for legislative action to abolish the board in its current form, which critics say is riddled by corruption, nepotism and incompetence.

De Blasio spoke hours after the board admitted erroneously adding about 135,000 dummy votes — a stunning 15% of the whole range cast in person — to the tally.

It then used those bogus totals to create an unofficial tally of how the count would look if voters’ lower choices were allotted according to the complex ranked choice balloting rules.

The flawed new tally purported to show a much tighter race than the original tentative tally of only first-place votes, with frontrunner Eric Adams barely in advance and Kathryn Garcia leapfrogging Maya Wiley into second.

It’s anyone’s guess how a real tally of the actual ranked choice votes without the dummy ballots will look.

Even once that tentative tally is sorted, elections officials will need to add at least 125,000 mail-in ballots that were due to be received by Tuesday at the latest.

They stated they wouldn’t complete that count till next week even though all the eligible ballots should be received already.