The election dispute in New York’s 13th Congressional District is crawling forward, as 42-year Rep. Charlie Rangel and his challenger in the Democratic primary, state Sen. Adriano Espaillat, wait for more votes to be tallied.
City election officials began counting absentee and provisional ballots Thursday, which brought preliminary good news for Rangel: The congressan gained 258 votes to Espaillat’s 105, according to the New York Daily News, thus boosting Rangel’s lead by 153 votes — up from the slender 802-vote lead he had going in.
Bronx Supreme Court Justice John W. Carter on Thursday scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, July 11, and ordered more transparency from election officials, in a response to a filing from Espaillat.
Espaillat filed suit Tuesday, alleging a series of irregularities in the primary regarding the suppression of Latino voters who might have been expected to vote for him, and charging that city election workers would not allow his campaign representatives to properly observe the vote count.
The Espaillat campaign asked for a full hand count of the ballots –Â and potentially even a new election: “The voter suppression and denial of the right to vote vitiates the validity of the primary election and warrants the court ordering a new primary election under Section 16-102(3) of the Election Law.”
In response, Rangel held a fiery press conference Wednesday: “You cannot do this by knocking the system. You can’t just do this by calling people crooks.”
When Rangel declared victory last week, and Espaillat conceded, the incumbent was seemingly ahead by more than 2,300 votes. But it turned out that a whopping 79 out of 506 precincts were initially entered by mistake into the system as having cast zero votes. With those errors corrected, Rangel’s lead shrunk Sunday to 802 votes.
