Rangel Race May Be Headed for Do-over, Thanks to Board of Elections ‘Incompetence’
By Margaret Hartmann
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The 21-term congressman is currently ahead by only 802 votes, with 2,000 absentee and affidavit ballots still uncounted. At a press conference on Monday afternoon, Espaillat essentially took back his concession to Rangel, saying that he went to bed on election night thinking he'd lost by twenty points. Now Rangel's lead is under 2 percent. According to the New York Times, Espaillat added:
I have received hundreds of complaints of voter suppression, and voters being turned away ... We will go to court, and we will go to the final round. I am going to fight to ensure that every single vote is counted.
It's now emerged that, in the initial count, the New York City Board of Elections recorded zeros in 79 of the thirteenth district’s 506 precincts. Many of those districts are in Dominican neighborhoods that leaned heavily toward Espaillat. The candidate said many of his family members found their names weren't in the election books on Tuesday, and the advocacy group LatinoJustice PRLDEF said an unusually high number of bilingual poll workers were transferred to other precincts that day for no apparent reason. The reports led some to question whether there might have been some underhandedness on the part of the long-serving congressman.
DNA Info reports that, on Monday, a judge allowed Espaillat's lawyers to withdraw a petition seeking court intervention in the count. His lawyers say that they intend to file a broader claim later this week that will allow them to call for a new election. Rangel's campaign manager says that he remains confident that the congressmen will still come out on top, but just to be safe, Rangel sent out an e-mail to supporters asking them for money to help him fight any court cases that might spring up.
While the results are still unclear, there's one point most parties are agreed on: The Board of Elections is ridiculously dysfunctional. The Times remarks that while its "incompetence" has been "well established" in previous election debacles, "it outdid itself in this primary." Espaillat called the Board of Elections "broken" and said, "We should just shut it down and build a new system." Predictably, Rangel's campaign manager was less critical, but even he admitted, "it would be fair to everybody to have the results election night." Despite publicly endorsing Rangel, Major Bloomberg couldn't resist taking a shot at the Board of Elections, which he's attacked in the past. “It’s about as corruptible a system as anybody could design," said Bloomberg.
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