Safe to safe New York City is a mess.
There's a heatwave there this week and current Mayor Bill de Blasio is warning about the fragility of the city's power grid. de Blasio told New Yorkers, “we need everyone to turn things down, turn things off immediately. Don’t have lights on if you don’t need them.”
Crime is on the rise. Homicides were up 25% from 2019 to 2020 and they continue to increase in 2021.
These are some of the issues New York voters took to the polls last week to pick their next mayoral candidates. This, too, has been a mess. On the Republican side, Curtis Sliwa will face off against the still unknown Democrat winner.
Why don't we know who won on the Democrat side? Because New York City is a mess. During this election, the city is trying 'ranked-choice voting. Ranked-choice voting allows voters to select their top 5 candidates. From there, as Time explains:
The candidate with the majority (more than 50%) of first-choice votes wins outright. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then it triggers a new counting process. The candidate who did the worst is eliminated, and that candidate’s voters’ ballots are redistributed to their second-choice pick. In other words, if you ranked a losing candidate as your first choice, and the candidate is eliminated, then your vote still counts: it just moves to your second-choice candidate. That process continues until there is a candidate who has the majority of votes.
Seems pretty straightforward. Except in the nation's most populated city.
From the New York Post:
The Democratic primary race for mayor was thrown into chaos Tuesday as the city Board of Elections appeared to have botched the count amid the city’s first ranked-choice election —adding 135,000 pre-election “test” ballots that hadn’t been cleared from a computer.
According to a BOE statement Tuesday night, “it has determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System . . .
“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up-to-date results are reported.”
Preliminary results released earlier in the day showed a total of 941,832 ballots cast for mayor, an increase of more than 140,000 from the 799,827 that were counted on June 22, the day of the primary.
This is why current Democrat leader Eric Adams has called into question, in a very Trump-like manner, what is exactly going on with New York City's vote count.
Sounds like NYC might need to call the Cyber Ninjas and conduct their own Arizona-type audit.