(CN) --- After a botched release of results threw off the first-ever ranked choice voting tabulation for New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, the city’s Board of Elections issued a new tally on Wednesday, showing Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams still leading — but by an even smaller margin.
Results released Tuesday had mistakenly included dummy votes used in a test run, which elections officials did not remove before tabulating the ranked choice results for in-person voting.
The Board of Elections called out the error late Tuesday night, following questions from Adams’ campaign about why the number of votes had jumped by more than 135,000 since primary day.
After correcting the error, the board conducted its do-over on Wednesday, producing similar results that showed an even narrower lead by Adams, a retired NYPD officer.
He leads former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 15,000 votes, claiming 51.1% after 9 rounds eliminating the bottom candidates from the race.
More than 124,000 absentee ballots are not included in that tally, and could shake things up once again, given the unpredictabilities of ranked choice voting and the contest’s narrow margins.
In the eighth round, for example — before Maya Wiley, a former counselor to Bill de Blasio and MSNBC analyst, was eliminated — the race between Garcia and Wiley in second and third places, respectively, is only determined by a few hundred votes.
Wiley called the race “wide open” in a statement, while Adams’ campaign said it believes that remaining absentee ballots will favor its candidate. Garcia has called on supporters to be patient while votes are counted, saying she doesn’t want to count any unhatched chickens.
Released Wednesday, the numbers in the race likely to determine the winner of the general election came along with an apology.
“Yesterday's ranked choice voting reporting error was unacceptable and we apologize to the voters and to the campaigns for the confusion,” the Board of Elections said in a statement.
Although it oversees elections in the Big Apple, the elections board is a state-run entity.
“Let us be clear: RCV was not the problem, rather a human error that could have been avoided,” it wrote. “We have implemented another layer of review and quality control before publishing information going forward.”
The statement, signed by President Frederic Umane and Secretary Miguelina Camilo on behalf of the board’s commissioners, who guaranteed that the election night first-choice vote counts, and its Wednesday ranked choice count, were both accurate.
Garcia’s and Adams’ campaigns have each filed preliminary lawsuits against the Board of Elections. Adams’ camp said in a statement that it wanted “to preserve our right to a fair election process and to have a judge oversee and review ballots, if necessary."
The elections board is set to release absentee ballot data next Tuesday, July 6. Absentee voters who forgot to sign their ballots or provide inner envelopes will then have time to “cure” their mistakes, meaning final results may not be available until the week of July 12.
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