Election Administration is a Dull Subject. That’s a Big Problem for Democrats.

NYC’s Ranked Choice Voting debacle only helps Republican politicians cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections

This is a story about deciding not to write a story, and what that tells us about the challenge of getting people to care about election processes at a time when they’re under attack in states across America.

This was originally going to be a piece about the complete mess the New York City Board of Elections has made of the Democratic primary for mayor. The primary, which was held last Tuesday, was supposed to be a showcase for Ranked Choice Voting, an electoral system that allows voters to rank the candidates in a race rather than voting for just one person. Instead, the NYC Board of Elections lived up to its reputation as a notoriously incompetent organization.

Yesterday, it released what was supposedly a new vote count in the election, only to realize after the fact that it had included 135,000 test ballots that it had failed to clear out of its system, making the entire count null and void. On top of that, 125,000 absentee ballots have yet to be counted, and won’t be any time soon, because New York City is famously slow at counting votes. And because of…