New Tally Suggests N.Y.C. Mayoral Primary Has Tightened

A new, preliminary tally of votes in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary on Wednesday suggested that the race between Eric Adams, the primary night leader, and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly, though the results do not account for around 125,000 absentee ballots that have yet to be tabulated.

A day after New York City’s Board of Elections retracted a tabulation of ranked-choice preferences, throwing the primary contest into chaos, the board on Wednesday released a fresh tally of ranked-choice preferences among those Democrats who voted in person last Tuesday or during the early voting period.

The tally showed Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, with a much narrower lead than the one he held on primary night, when only the first-choice preferences were counted, but in percentage terms, an identical margin to the one he held on Tuesday, in the uncorrected tally. According to the new numbers, he again led Kathryn Garcia in the final round, 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent. Maya D. Wiley was narrowly in third place, trailing Ms. Garcia by only 347 votes before being theoretically eliminated after the eighth round of tallies.

In prepared statements issued immediately upon the release of the new tally, all three candidates projected confidence, with Mr. Adams’s campaign saying, “There are still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric.” Ms. Wiley said “this election is still wide open,” and Ms. Garcia called it a “dead heat.”

Under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, voters can rank up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives over 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: Lower-polling candidates are eliminated one by one in separate rounds, with their votes distributed to whichever candidate those voters ranked next. The process continues until there is a winner.

All three candidates remain in contention, and those numbers could be scrambled again as the city’s Board of Elections tabulates outcomes that will include the absentee ballots, with a full result not expected until mid-July.

In a statement, the Board of Elections stressed that the fault for the initial error did not lie with ranked-choice voting.

“We have implemented another layer of review and quality control before publishing information going forward,” said the statement from the board’s commissioners. “We can say with certainty that the election night vote counts were and are accurate and the RCV data put out today is correct as well.”

The statement acknowledged that the board “must regain the trust of New Yorkers. We will continue to hold ourselves accountable and apologize to New York City voters for any confusion.”

Legal proceedings are getting underway as the count continues. Such action, legal experts say, is standard, but it also underscores the uncertainty of the moment.

Mr. Adams’s campaign announced that it had filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Ms. Garcia’s campaign also indicated in a statement that it was filing in court, to preserve its “rights under election law to protect the canvass and provide for court supervision of the vote count if needed.”

The Wiley campaign declined to comment on any potential legal proceedings.

On May 26, the supplier of the software that New York City would use to tabulate votes for its most important mayoral primary in a generation offered to help run it.

Not for the last time, the city’s Board of Elections ignored the supplier’s offer.

A month later, the board used the program to run a preliminary tally of the results of the primary election. In doing so, it forgot to delete test data, adding 135,000 erroneous votes to the tally and, for the umpteenth time in its checkered history, undermining the electorate’s faith in its ability to accurately administer elections.

Christopher W. Hughes, the policy director at the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, which provided the open-source software, said that having someone else work on the process might have helped avoid the error.

“We had offered up to the Board of Elections to be there in person or remotely and support running the ranked-choice voting election,” Mr. Hughes said in an interview on Wednesday.

Mr. Hughes said the resource center could have run a parallel process, using the same data and a copy of the same software, to ensure that the results matched.

“Just having had another set of eyes, it’s more likely somebody would have caught the extra 135,000 ballots,” he said.

Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, a spokeswoman for the elections board, declined to address the substance of Mr. Hughes’ assertion.

Instead, she reiterated the board’s position that the problem was not caused by the software, but by the agency’s staff.

“The issue was not the software,” Ms. Vazquez said. “There was a human error where a staffer did not remove the test ballot images from the Election Management System.”

Understanding the potential role of human error, Mr. Hughes had offered to train New York City election workers on the software, and to provide “remote or in-person support” when it came time to tabulate the vote.

“Would love to have a call to discuss the scope of our engagement and finalize a contract describing the scope of our work,” Mr. Hughes emailed elections officials on May 26. “Is there a time tomorrow or Friday that works to discuss?”

His original proposal set out a budget of $90,000 for assistance through 2025, at the cost of $100 or $150 an hour.

Mr. Hughes did not hear back from the official in charge of the tabulations. On June 2, he tried again.

“If you’re not available this week happy to talk next week — just want to get a clearer definition of how we can support you all with the RCV elections,” he wrote, referring to ranked-choice voting, which the city is employing for the first time in a mayoral election.

Mr. Hughes left a number of messages with board officials, and tried again via email on June 14. “We are available to come to the City and provide support,” he wrote.

Mr. Hughes made one last attempt, on June 21, the day before the primary.

“Writing to let you know that I’m in New York for the election tomorrow,” he wrote. “Would love to stop by the BOE this week (I’m here through Saturday) to check in and see how things are going.”

He never heard back.

The organization’s software was used last year in Democratic primaries in Kansas, Wyoming and Alaska. Mr. Hughes said the center always offered some assistance to jurisdictions using its software.

“Other jurisdictions tended to be more responsive to outreach, though,” he said.

As the New York City Board of Elections, an agency built on political patronage and defined by a history of ineptitude, struggles to count ballots during a primary featuring a new way of voting, it is missing something fairly significant: half of its longtime operational leadership.

Michael Ryan, the executive director since 2013, has been on medical leave since early March, a board spokeswoman said on Wednesday. And Pamela Perkins, the agency’s administrative manager, retired on June 1 after nearly two decades in the position, the spokeswoman, Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, said. Both are Democrats.

Wilma Brown Phillips, a Democratic district leader who was chosen to succeed Ms. Perkins, started in the job on Monday, Ms. Vazquez-Diaz said.

In the absence of Mr. Ryan and Ms. Perkins, day-to-day operations are effectively being run by the board’s two top Republican executives, Dawn Sandow and Georgea Kontzamanis, as the depleted leadership ranks confront a level of election chaos that is unusual even by the agency’s checkered standards.

Ms. Sandow, the board’s deputy executive director, took her job in 2010 after several years as the deputy chief clerk at the agency’s Bronx office. She was the board’s acting executive director from 2010 to 2013.

She is a former executive director of the Bronx Republican Party with deep ties to Guy Velella, a longtime lawmaker and Bronx party leader who quit elected office in 2004 after pleading guilty in a bribery conspiracy. (Mr. Velella died in 2011.)

In 2008, the city’s Department of Investigation found that Ms. Sandow had voted in the Bronx from 2001 to 2004, despite saying in sworn testimony that she lived in Rockland County during that time, according to a department memorandum.

In a statement, Ms. Vazquez-Diaz said Ms. Sandow had voted in the Bronx in those years because she was living there while separated from her former husband. She did not vote in 2005 after reuniting with him briefly. She later moved back to the Bronx, Ms. Vazquez-Diaz said.

Ms. Kontzamanis, who previously worked for Republicans in the State Senate, was hired as the board’s operations manager in 2015. She was nominated to the newly created, unadvertised post by Ronald Castorina Jr., the chairman of the Staten Island Republican Party, and approved by a unanimous board vote.

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

— Ed Shanahan

When the New York City Board of Elections announced Tuesday night that it had screwed up in tallying the votes for mayor, lawmakers reacted with anger — but not much surprise.

After years of watching the board make errors, they have grown accustomed to problems.

The board mistakenly purged about 200,000 people from voter rolls before the 2016 election. It forced some voters to wait in four-hour lines on Election Day 2018. It sent erroneous ballots to nearly 100,000 New Yorkers seeking to vote by mail last year.

And those are just the recent blunders.

For decades, since nearly the founding of the election board, critics have complained about its structure, its history of nepotism and its lack of accountability. New York is the only state with local election boards whose staff members are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses.

In 1940, a city investigation found that the board was plagued by “illegality, inefficiency, laxity and waste.” In 1971, a New York Times editorial derided it as “at best a semi‐functioning anachronism.” And in 1985, another city inquiry said it had an “almost embarrassing lack of understanding” of its job.

In recent years, some lawmakers have proposed reforms, but they have failed to gain much traction. The election board’s structure is enshrined in the New York state constitution, so it is difficult to change. Political leaders also have little incentive to support reform because the current system gives them a lot of power.

Earlier this year, State Senator Liz Krueger, a Democrat from Manhattan, unsuccessfully proposed a bill to make the board’s operations more professional.

On Tuesday, following the latest high-profile mistake, another Democratic state senator, Zellnor Myrie of Brooklyn, vowed to push the state to finally tackle the problems.

“If you’re an upset voter tonight, I hear you,” Mr. Myrie, who leads the Senate’s Elections Committee, wrote on Twitter. “We have to do better for you. And we will. Stay tuned for a hearing date and bring all the energy, concerns, and ideas for change to the table. We stand ready to listen and where possible, implement.”

Eric Adams filed a lawsuit on Wednesday seeking to reserve his right to have a judge review the ballots in the Democratic primary for mayor.

The lawsuit, which was filed in Kings County Supreme Court, preserves the campaign’s rights to challenge the results once they are official. Though experts say such legal action is standard, it comes just a day after Mr. Adams and other candidates blasted the New York City Board of Elections for accidentally counting 135,000 test ballots in a preliminary tally of the ranked-choice results of the Democratic primary.

“Today we petitioned the court to preserve our right to a fair election process and to have a judge oversee and review ballots, if necessary,” the Adams campaign said in a statement. “We invite the other campaigns to join us and petition the court as we all seek a clear and trusted conclusion to this election.”

Andrew Yang filed a similar suit before the election, but he withdrew it after he conceded following a fourth-place finish in the initial vote.

Under state law, a candidate must file a challenge within 10 days after the primary, before all of the results may have been finalized. That’s why many candidates file so-called prophylactic lawsuits, said Jerry H. Goldfeder, a well-known election lawyer who is not representing any candidate in the mayoral contest.

“Even without the error by the board,” Mr. Goldfeder said, “it’s fairly standard for candidates to begin these lawsuits to protect their rights if down the road they disagree with the board ruling in the race.”

The chaos that engulfed the New York City mayoral race on Tuesday stemmed from a large-scale human error committed by the city Board of Elections.

The board had created about 135,000 dummy ballots to test the ranked-choice-voting software being used in several of the elections on Primary Day, including in the Democratic primary for mayor. Those dummy ballots had votes for candidates on them.

On Tuesday, the board ran a preliminary ranked-choice tally that was supposed to show the state of the race pending the counting of more than 100,000 absentee ballots. But someone neglected to remove the dummy ballots from the system, so the tally included both the dummy ballots and more than 800,000 actual ballots cast by voters.

Hours after the board released the results of this contaminated tally, it realized its error and took them down. It said that it would rerun the tally and publish the new results Wednesday afternoon.

The results that were mistakenly released showed that the race had tightened considerably during the “elimination rounds,” in which the candidates with the fewest first-choice votes were removed and their votes were distributed to whoever the voter had ranked next.

Eric Adams led the race by more than 9 percentage points when only first-choice votes were counted. After the elimination rounds, he was beating his nearest rival, Kathryn Garcia, by only about 2 percentage points.

It is unclear to what degree, if any, the 135,000 dummy ballots were responsible for this effect.

The votes on the dummy ballots seemed to have been fairly evenly distributed among all candidates. Many of them appeared to have “ranked” only one candidate, said Rob Richie, president of FairVote, a national group that promotes ranked-choice voting. He said those factors made it less likely that the dummy ballots had a big effect and that it was likely true that the race had tightened.

The correct partial tally that the board plans to release today will not be the official final tally. That will have to wait at least a week, after the board has counted the 124,000 absentee ballots.

Candidates in the New York City mayoral race reacted to the news that the city Board of Elections had accidentally counted 135,000 test ballots, throwing the preliminary results of ranked-choice voting into question. New preliminary results are expected Wednesday afternoon.

Here are statements made Tuesday night by the top three candidates.

“Today’s mistake by the Board of Elections was unfortunate. It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time. We appreciate the board’s transparency and acknowledgment of their error. We look forward to the release of an accurate, updated simulation, and the timely conclusion of this critical process.” Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.

“This error by the Board of Elections is not just failure to count votes properly today, it is the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed. Sadly, it is impossible to be surprised. Last summer BOE mishandled tens of thousands of mail-in ballots during the June 2020 primary. It has also been prone to complaints of patronage. Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times. The B.O.E. must now count the remainder of the votes transparently and ensure the integrity of the process moving forward. New Yorkers deserve it.” Maya Wiley, the former counsel to the mayor.

“New Yorkers want free and fair elections, which is why we overwhelmingly voted to enact ranked-choice voting. The BOE’s release of incorrect ranked-choice votes is deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation. Every ranked-choice and absentee vote must be counted accurately so that all New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and our government. I am confident that every candidate will accept the final results and support whomever the voters have elected.” Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner.

— The New York Times

Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has criticized the Board of Elections in the past as an “outdated organization in dire need of modernization,” said on Wednesday that the ranked-choice fiasco that has plunged the 2021 mayoral primary into chaos was further proof that the agency as presently constituted needed to be eliminated and replaced.

“Yet again, the fundamental structural flaws of the Board of Elections are on display,” Mr. de Blasio said in a statement in which he called for “an immediate, complete recanvass” of the vote count and “a clear explanation of what went wrong.”

“Going forward,” he added, “there must be a complete structural rebuild of the board.”

In his statement, the mayor noted that he had offered board leaders $20 million five years ago to hire a consultant and enact a series of changes geared toward shifting day-to-day operations from political appointees to professional managers.

“They refused,” Mr. de Blasio said.

The mayor also reiterated his support for legislation that would make the board, whose structure is enshrined in the state Constitution, directly answerable instead to New York City officials, as well as for a constitutional amendment that would create a board that placed election expertise above partisan loyalties.

“It’s a necessary, fundamental change,” he said.

— Ed Shanahan