MANHATTAN (CN) — Ranked-choice voting is keeping the fight alive in the contest to become New York City’s next mayor.
Former police captain Eric Adams took the lead in last week’s Democratic primary, based on first-choice votes only. When the New York City Board of Elections released its first round of ranked-choice voting results on Tuesday, Adams stayed on top — but with a margin so narrow that absentee ballots could still decide it.
Now in second place is former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia, edging out Maya Wiley, former counselor to Mayor Bill de Blasio and an MSNBC legal analyst.
After 11 rounds of ranked-choice voting — each round eliminating the bottom candidate until one ended up with more than half the vote — Adams came out ahead, with 51.1%, or 368,898 votes.
Garcia trails by fewer than 16,000 votes, and the latest results do not include the more than 124,000 absentee ballots left to be counted.
The elections board had been set to release absentee ballot data next Tuesday, July 6. That timeline could shift, however, after a disclosure late Tuesday that the latest round of results contained ballot test images that were already supposed to have been removed from the system.
Adams had raised concerns over the number of votes tallied, noting that Tuesday's vote total was "100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night."
The board has since promised to regenerate the cast-vote record and retabulate the ranked-choice-voting rounds. "Board staff has removed all test ballot images from the system and will upload election night results, cross-referencing against election night reporting software for verification," it said.
Another factor threatening to prolong the process is a new mail-in voting policy that requires county election boards to notify voters of incorrect signatures or missing inner envelopes. Once notified, the voter gets time to “cure” the mistake. Final results may not be available until the week of July 12 as a result.
That means at least another week in limbo for New Yorkers awaiting the official winner of the race likely to determine the general election in November.
In a statement on Tuesday, Garcia encouraged supporters to be patient, saying her team is “confident about a path to victory.”
“Once all the votes are counted, I know everyone will support the Democratic nominee and that’s exactly what I intend to do,” she said. “We look forward to the final results. Democracy is worth waiting for.”
Adams said he remained confident in his chances of winning but would not comment otherwise on Tuesday's results given the voting total irregularities. He had declared on primary night that “the little guy won today,” but acknowledged that the results counted first-choice votes only.
“There’s going to be twos and threes and fours, we know that,” Adams said. “But there’s something else we know: New York City said, ‘our first choice is Eric Adams.’”
Compared to the 13-candidate Democratic field, the Republican mayoral primary was decidedly less complicated. After ranked-choice voting was factored in, Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa maintained his win over restaurant owner Fernando Mateo, capturing 64.4% of Republicans, or 39,760 votes.
On top of the vote for mayor, the ranked-choice system was used for public advocate, comptroller, borough president and city council elections.
Alvin Bragg, a former deputy attorney general who led a special unit to investigate police-involved killings, leads the race for Manhattan district attorney, ahead of former Brooklyn prosecutor Tali Farhadian Weinstein.
Bragg, who also worked as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, has said he will end cash bail and decline to prosecute low-level offenses when doing so wouldn’t benefit public safety.
The next DA is expected to take over Cyrus Vance Jr.’s investigation into Donald Trump and the Trump Organization, the former president’s family business. The details of the investigation are not yet public, but The New York Times reported that Vance could announce charges as soon as this week.
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