Don’t rip up paper tally, city urged

The electronic vote-counting fiasco in Iowa shows the city should stick to paper ballots, say Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and good-government group Common Cause.

“Elections don’t count if every vote isn’t counted fully and fairly,” Adams said in a Wednesday statement. “The Iowa debacle should be a wakeup call for how we integrate new technologies into our election systems.”

Common Cause Executive Director Susan Lerner slammed plans to implement touchscreen voting throughout the state.

“New Yorkers don’t need to spend money on expensive new technology that we know doesn’t work when we already operate on the gold standard: voter-marked paper ballots,” she said.

The statements came as the state is testing the “ExpressVoteXL” system designed by Nebraska-based Electronic Systems & Software. The head of the state Senate’s Elections Committee has called on the state Board of Elections to slow down the approval process so it can get more info about the tech.

The city’s Board of Elections has not announced any changes to the status quo, in which Big Apple voters mark their choices on paper ballots that get scanned by machines.

“The commissioners of the Board of Elections in the City of New York have not directed pursuit of any change to the current voting system,” city Election Board spokeswoman Valeriz Vazquez-Diaz said in a statement.

“Ranked-choice” voting comes to the Big Apple starting in June 2021, she said. Right now, the candidate who wins the biggest percentage of votes for city office wins, even if it’s less than 50%. But under ranked choice, voters will pick their top five candidates from first to last for each seat. If no one wins a majority on the first go, then the last-place candidate will be eliminated and the votes reallocated.

The change calls for a huge educational effort from the city, Adams said, calling on the City Council and Mayor de Blasio to devote $10 million to educating New Yorkers about rankedchoice voting.