When the Ranked Choice Voting elimination process began the day after election day, the vote totals at the start included both the actual votes cast on election day as well as the 135,000 votes still in the tabulation software from the test.

All through the ten rounds of elimination, that super-duper validation process that ensures accuracy of the outcome never noticed that vote totals being aggregated were 15% higher than the vote totals reported on election night.

I guess no one was assigned the “Make sure the number on this line is the same as the number on that line” responsibility in the Elections Office.

And this brings me back to the headline. New York City — for a week — has been counting 135,000 “ballots” as part of the tabulation process that were never cast. No one noticed.

Yet the Democrats and the media claim that GOP efforts to make state election officials “check your work” in November were an assault on democracy when a combined total of 42,500 votes in three states determined the outcome of the election. Those states were using radically different election processes involving millions of mailed-in ballots for the first time, and in some instances using voting machines and software that had never been used before. //

It took NYC a week to recognize a blatant and obvious idiotic error — and it only did so after it was pointed out by one of the candidates and the media.

Now consider, on the other hand, how long it would take to unearth a well-planned and well-concealed exercise to artificially increase the vote totals of one candidate with the cooperation of political allies in a municipal government’s election office.

The system is broken.

Simple as that.