NYC vote fiasco fuels debate on election integrity
WASHINGTON – New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary was thrust into the national debate about voting rights and election integrity this week after election officials revealed they had erroneously included 135,000 sample ballots in tabulations made public Tuesday.
Election experts and political observers of both parties said Wednesday they doubted New York City’s fiasco would change many minds about the necessity of rewriting election laws in a variety of states.
But they did express concern that New York’s problems will further fuel Republican rhetoric and misgivings about how U.S. elections are conducted.
“It doesn’t matter that New York’s problems have nothing to do with Arizona or Georgia,” said John Pitney, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. “When you’re gaslighting, any gas will do.”
Former President Donald Trump and GOP allies pointed to the New York error as justification for changes to voting laws in states like Georgia and Arizona, where Trump lost in the 2020 president election.
“Watch the mess you are about to see in New York City, it will go on forever,” Trump said in a statement Wednesday.
Trump has repeatedly pushed false claims that widespread voter fraud led to his loss to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. His efforts to overturn the results ran into a string of defeats in the courts, including the Supreme Court. But Trump’s claims have galvanized his supporters, many of whom tell pollsters they don’t trust the results of last year’s election.
Whether New York’s isolated election debacle triggers more support for election changes elsewhere remains to be seen. Republican-controlled legislatures across the country are changing state election rules while Democrats have failed to pass a national voting rights package in Congress.
Partisan positions have hardened, according to experts, nearly eight months after the 2020 presidential election and nearly six months after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol designed to subvert Biden’s victory.
From new voting rules in Georgia to a “ballot audit” in Arizona, Trump backers are pushing changes that would, in essence, give them more control over how elections are conducted and tabulated. Wisconsin and Michigan, two other states that Trump won in 2016 but lost to Biden in 2020, are among other states considering changes in the wake of Trump’s complaints.
But former Attorney General William Barr and a swath of judges and election officials in several states have dismissed Trump’s claims of vote fraud as groundless; voter fraud in any form is very rare. An analysis from the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice found 491 cases of absentee voter fraud out of billions of votes cast across all U.S. elections from 2000 to 2012.
Not many minds will be changed by New York’s problems, said Republican political commentator Scott Jennings.
“Everybody ramps up to an extreme position,” he said, “neither of which is true.”
Issues in NYC vs. other states
Outspoken Trump allies, such as Rep. Elise Stefanik, of New York, who was recently elevated to House GOP leadership, said the mistake underscores a need for tighter election rules and required audits.
“I’m looking forward to the far left (Democrats) of NYC joining me in supporting election audits and strengthening election integrity,” she said in a tweet Wednesday. “Will the media meltdown like they do about Republicans who want to strengthen elections? Methinks not.”
But the election complaints in Trump-contested states are different from the issue in New York City. The biggest difference is that New York’s problems stem from a new and unique voting system called “ranked-choice voting.”
Under the new system, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots, ranking them in order of preference.
If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-place votes in a first count, lower-ranked candidates are eliminated and another count is commenced. In that second round of voting, first preference votes for failed candidates are eliminated, and second choices on those ballots are redistributed to the remaining candidates.
Steven Law, president and CEO of Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, told USA TODAY the error seems to be a fault the “disastrous performance” by the board of elections and confusion over rankedchoice voting.
“It does reinforce the GOP argument that simpler voting systems, which yield a conclusive result on election night are vastly superior to those with lots of different ways of voting that open the door to error and delay, if not fraud,” Law said.