patrick.net

The Democratic primary race for mayor was thrown into chaos Tuesday as the city Board of Elections appeared to have botched the count amid the city’s first ranked-choice election — adding 135,000 pre-election “test” ballots that hadn’t been cleared from a computer.

According to a BOE statement Tuesday night, “it has determined that ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System . . .

“The Board apologizes for the error and has taken immediate measures to ensure the most accurate up to date results are reported.”

Preliminary results released earlier in the day showed a total of 941,832 ballots cast for mayor, an increase of more than 140,000 from the 799,827 that were counted on June 22, the day of the primary.

The glaring discrepancy at first went unnoticed until it was flagged by front-runner Eric Adams.

“The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,” an Adams spokesman said.

“We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the ranked-choice voting projection.”

In response, the embattled agency scrubbed all the results from its website, replacing them with a message saying, “Unofficial Rank Choice ­Results Starting on June 30.”

Some questioned why the agency even released preliminary results.

Veteran political consultant Sid Davidoff, a former aide to Mayor John Lindsay, said: “It’s unclear why the Board of Elections put out these preliminary results today as they are relatively meaningless when you have 120,000 absentee ballots still outstanding.