While Zohran Mamdani claims victory in the Democratic mayoral primary and his chief rival Andrew Cuomo has conceded (along with all the other candidates), none of the Tuesday night statements (Mamdani’s speech actually began after midnight) have any legal bearing.
It’s going to take until next week to determine the formal winner, even though we all know the outcome, if not the final exact tally. How stupid is that?
How can this be? Didn’t we all see the same vote count of first choice selections that caused Cuomo to make a telephone call to Mamdani to congratulate him? The answer is because the asinine city Board of Elections refuses to publish the full ballot information, called the “cast vote record,” from the million or so ballots which contains the second and third and fourth and fifth place choices of the voters and we have to wait until next Tuesday to find out the final results.
That’s nuts and it also violates the City Charter, essentially New York City constitution, which explicitly requires that the cast vote record be published. Sure, the BOE will publish the cast vote record, but not until after the election has been certified, which is weeks from now.
How ridiculous. The info for the ballots should be put online on a rolling basis, once a ballot is deemed valid and counted.
The way our system works is when a marked paper ballot is scanned in, the machine takes a photo of the front and back of the sheet and also creates an associated electronic file, the cast vote record, with all the relevant data from that ballot. While the paper ballot is safely locked away to prevent any tampering, the ballot image and cast vote record are vital public information that the public can’t see.
This Tuesday night, when polls closed at 9 p.m., after the citizens of New York had come in solid numbers to vote in brutally hot weather, only the first choice of the voters were published by the Board of Elections. The Board does not run the full tabulation until they receive every valid ballot, which also includes mail and absentee ballots that had been postmarked by primary day and received by next Tuesday.
That’s fine, as every vote must count, even a mail ballot that is received next Monday, but what the Board should do is publish online the cast vote records as they come in and are recorded. Then anyone could take that large dataset and run their own ranked choice sequence.
Using open source software, the candidates or the press or any person anywhere could take the data and do their analysis of the results. It would still be unofficial, but the results that the Board posts on Tuesday nights aren’t official either, as we’ve been told repeatedly over years.
In fact, the only “official” results are the ones that are certified, which won’t happen for weeks.
So if it’s safe for New Yorkers to have partial unofficial numbers from the Board on election night, why not let us have much more complete, but still unofficial numbers on election night?
Logical, isn’t it? However, the Board of Elections doesn’t believe in logic.
