No you can’t drop the verb in these sentences and stay grammatical.

I suspect the large number of occurrences of this typo is due to the fact the missing letter is also the first letter of autant so when typing it, we make some kind of a shortcut and jump to the next word; then, while reading a faulty sentence, the brain is regenerating the missing a without us noticing.

This theory is supported by the fact a similar issue can be observed with il y aussi, for example in this OQLF article:

il n’y a pas que ses petits-enfants qui comptent; il y aussi sa femme.