(Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
June 30, 2021 By Michael Dorgan
Former US President Donald Trump has blasted the New York City Board of Elections handling of the Democratic primary mayoral vote, labeling it as “an embarrassment and total mess.”
Trump, in two separate emails sent out to his supporters Wednesday morning, ripped the Board for revealing overnight that more than 135,000 test ballots were included as part of the count – thereby plunging the vote into disarray.
The Queens native pounced on the confusion as justification for his own claims – and those of many of his supporters – that the 2020 Presidential Election was a “scam and a hoax.”
“Just like in the 2020 Presidential Election, it was announced overnight in New York City that vast irregularities and mistakes were made and that Eric Adams, despite an almost insurmountable lead, may not win the race,” Trump wrote in his first email.
“The fact is, based on what has happened, nobody will ever know who really won.”
Adams led Maya Wiley by around 9 percent and Kathryn Garcia by around 12 percent in the first-round tally results released last week in the crucial primary. The tabulation was based on the number of voters who had ranked each candidate first on their ballots.
The vote was thrown into chaos Tuesday when the Board of Elections released its preliminary results – only to yank them five hours later. The count was supposed to allocate ranked-choice votes and saw Garcia leapfrogging Wiley into second place and narrowing Adams’ lead in the process.
However, that count included thousands of test ballots that should not have been tallied.
The Board of Elections attributed the discrepancy to a technical error caused by a test run of the ranking system that had not been cleared from its computing system before the latest tabulations, according to The City.
Nevertheless, Trump was quick to take advantage of the controversy and ridiculed the city’s election process.
“Watch the mess you are about to see in New York City, it will go on forever. They should close the books and do it all over again, the old-fashioned way, when we had results that were accurate and meaningful,” Trump wrote.
Despite the large discrepancies, Trump claimed in a second email that the Democratic primary mayoral count was still more accurate than the 2020 presidential election.
“The New York City Election, even though an embarrassment and total mess, is far better and more accurate than my 2020 Presidential Election—so what are people complaining about!”
