Some 15 days after a June 22 election in New York which was called a Democratic primary for Mayor, Black moderate Democrat and former policeman Eric Adams is being unofficially called the winner. The city government had decided to introduce the social-engineering technique called “ranked-choice voting,” resulting in yet another election in a predominantly Democratic state in which the winner could not be determined for weeks, with lawsuits publicly threatened over the results, etc. Adams, who opposed defunding or reducing the police force, appears to have won the strange contest of 14 candidates by 1%.
The tortured process of counting in this incredibly complex “election,” in which the Board of Elections made colossal mistakes which might have invalidated the result, was being reported as threatening the future of “ranked-choice voting” nationally, which is being pushed by the Committee for American Progress. This led to a lengthy Washington Post op-ed July 6 which maintained that Black and other minority-group Americans were not disadvantaged — though admitting that many might think so — by an election process which requires that voters take the time and have the resources to be well informed about at least five of the candidates in a large field. The vote of a New Yorker who voted, for example, only for Adams, would likely not count equally with that of a voter who chose and ranked five candidates.
So the same Democrats who insisted in 2020 that everyone had to vote (by mail) and every vote had to be counted whether on time or not, or the result would be “worse than Jim Crow,” now bring forward a new system in which some, “super-informed” voters are more equal than others. And the same Democrats defending this system by saying minority voters can easily stay on top of, say, their top five choices in a 14-candidate field, are screaming that state laws requiring voters to know what precinct they’re in, and to have photo IDs, are “Jim Crow on steroids.”
