President Donald Trump on Monday suggested that a Democratic Primary in New York should undergo a "revote." It's been six weeks since the election took place and there are still no declared winners in New York's 12th Congressional District – which includes parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens – and 15th Congressional District – which includes the West Bronx.
"I think you probably have to take the Carolyn Maloney race and run it over again," Trump said, referencing the sitting congresswoman from the 12th Congressional District. "How can you do this? And this is a small race with literally thousands of people. Small thousands. And it’s all messed up. They’re six weeks into it now they have no clue what’s going on."
The results from the primary are still in limbo because New York City failed to prepare for a massive increase in absentee ballots, The New York Times reported. In fact, election officials saw 10 times the number of absentee ballot applications, likely due to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. There have also been major delays in counting the roughly 400,000 ballots that were received.
From the NYT:
Election lawyers said one area of concern in New York City was that mail-in ballots have prepaid return envelopes. The Postal Service apparently had difficulty processing some of them correctly and, as a result, an unknown number of votes — perhaps thousands — may have been wrongfully disqualified because of a lack of a postmark.
Thousands more ballots in the city were discarded by election officials for minor errors, or not even sent to voters until the day before the primary, making it all but impossible for the ballots to be returned in time.
Suraj Patel, one of the candidates running in the 12th Congressional District against the incumbent, filed a lawsuit asking the court to order election officials to count all disqualified ballots. The race between Patel and Maloney is close, with Maloney ahead only 3,700 votes. But, 12,000 ballots have been disqualified, 1,200 of which because they were missing postmarks.
The other issue, according to Patel's lawsuit, is that election officials mailed out around 34,000 ballots one day before the election.
Republicans have repeatedly sounded the alarm on mail-in voting. Just last week a CBS reporter conducted an experiment to see how many mock ballots the United States Postal Service would return once mailed. Three percent were lost. In California, more than 100,000 ballots were tossed, 70,000 of which were not mailed by the deadline.