New Results Expected in New York Mayor’s Race

New York City’s Board of Elections will release a new tally of votes in the Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday.

Let’s hope it goes better than it did last week when officials announced inaccurate figures and had to retract them.

The updated tally on Tuesday should include most of the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots that were not included in the first count. It should give us a better sense of who is likely to win the race, though final results are not expected until next week.

In a corrected preliminary tally released last week, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was leading his closest rival, Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, by just 14,755 votes, a margin of around 2 percentage points.

Mr. Adams needs to hold on to his lead, while Ms. Garcia is hoping to overtake him by winning more absentee votes in Manhattan and by appearing on more ballots as voters’ second or third choice. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, was in third place and believes she still has a chance to win.

The city is using a new ranked-choice voting system that allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Since no one won more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the winner will be decided by a process of elimination: Lower-polling candidates are eliminated in rounds, with their votes distributed to whichever candidate those voters ranked next.

Officials did not say when to expect the results on Tuesday, but the Board of Elections announced in a cryptic post on Twitter on Tuesday morning that the new results should arrive during “brunch special” hours instead of “club hours” late at night. That prompted a playful debate on social media over when exactly it is appropriate to eat brunch in New York City.

Many New York City voters got their first glimpse at how ranked-choice voting can reshape an election last week, when the Board of Elections released a preliminary tally of ranked-choice election results.

Though Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led his nearest competitor by almost 10 percentage points after the first-round ballot, that lead shrank considerably after the ranked-choice results were tabulated.

The Board of Elections will release new results on Tuesday, which will include almost all absentee ballots and could tighten the race further, or even produce a winner — though full results are not expected for another week or more.

This year’s primary marked the first time that ranked-choice voting was used in a citywide election in New York. Instead of selecting just one candidate on their ballots, voters ranked up to five, in order of preference.

In the Democratic mayoral primary, no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote. As a result, the Board of Elections eliminated the last-place finisher and redistributed first-choice votes for that candidate to voters’ second-choice picks.

The process continues, moving through voters’ third-, fourth- and fifth-choice picks, until there is a winner with a majority of votes. When all of a voter’s choices have been eliminated, their ballot is said to be exhausted.

Here’s more information on the ranked-choice ballot and how the rounds of counting will work.

The ranked-choice system was also used in the primaries for City Council seats, borough president, public advocate and comptroller. The ranked-choice system did not come into play in the Republican mayoral primary because Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, won over 50 percent of the vote.

Proponents of ranked-choice voting say that the system offers voters more of a say, particularly in cities like New York, where crowded Democratic primaries are often as important as the general election. They also say it is more cost-effective than holding runoff contests.

Some critics have argued that the system was overly complex. They have also said that elections officials could have done more to educate the public about the system and how it works, though few problems were reported at the polls.

Maya Wiley finished third in a preliminary tally of votes in the New York City mayor’s race last week, but she believes she still has a path to victory.

“It remains a deeply competitive race,” said Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, as she stood in front of City Hall last week and called for every vote to be counted.

Ms. Wiley is hoping that a new tally of votes on Tuesday that includes most of the remaining absentee ballots will help her overtake her two leading rivals, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, and Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner.

Under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system, Ms. Wiley was eliminated in the ninth round after trailing Ms. Garcia by fewer than 350 votes.

Mathematically, it is still possible for her to prevail in the end, though she needs to win a significant chunk of the absentee votes in parts of the city where she did well on Primary Day. She polled strongly in neighborhoods known for younger progressive voters, including Williamsburg in Brooklyn, Long Island City in Queens and the East Village in Manhattan.

She must also be ranked second or third by many of the voters who preferred losing candidates like Andrew Yang and Scott Stringer.

But Ms. Garcia has a significant advantage in Manhattan, the borough with the most absentee votes, while Mr. Adams is strong across Brooklyn and the outer boroughs. In addition, Ms. Garcia struck a late alliance with Mr. Yang, the 2020 presidential candidate, and may be more likely to be ranked second on the ballots of his supporters.

Still, Ms. Wiley consolidated support among progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during the final weeks of the race, and she did better than expected on Primary Day, receiving more first-choice votes than Ms. Garcia.

In the week between the first, largely symbolic tabulation of ranked-choice votes and Tuesday, when a more substantive tabulation is set to be released, New York City voters existed in something of a news vacuum.

The campaigns of both Kathryn Garcia and Eric Adams sought to fill the void with wonky memos explaining how their respective candidates might win, given their relative strength among voters from various parts of the city who sent in absentee ballots instead of voting in person.

For the first time in a mayor’s race, New York City voters were able to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. The Board of Elections tabulates the votes in a series of elimination rounds — in each round, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and that candidate’s votes are reallocated to the voters’ second choice. The process continues until there are only two candidates left.

As of last Tuesday, Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was leading Ms. Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, by nearly 15,000 in-person votes. That result was only preliminary, though, because at the time some 125,000 Democratic mail-in ballots had yet to be counted. Most of those ballots are expected to be included in Tuesday’s tabulations.

The question the candidates have been trying to answer is how all those absentee ballots will change the preliminary results. Will they follow the same pattern as the in-person ballots, giving the win to Mr. Adams? Or will they heavily favor Ms. Garcia, putting her over the top?

A third possibility is they may catapult the third place finisher, Maya Wiley, into first. The ranked-choice voting system makes predictions extremely complex.

Mr. Adams’s campaign memo argues that he is likely to win in the final count because there are nearly 38,000 absentee ballots from districts where Mr. Adams’s margin over Ms. Garcia was greater than 20 percent in first-choice rankings, while there are only 35,600 absentee votes coming from districts where Ms. Garcia had a sizable lead.

Ms. Garcia’s memo, predictably, has a different take. Her campaign argues that because Ms. Garcia is poised to benefit from second-place votes from New Yorkers who ranked Ms. Wiley and Andrew Yang first, she is the consensus candidate who is likely to emerge victorious.

“This is a ranked choice election — not first-past-the-post — and the winner is NOT necessarily the candidate in first place in Round 1,” the memo reads, citing a 2010 mayoral election in Oakland, Calif., in which the eventual victor, Jean Quan, overtook the first-round winner in the city’s ranked-choice voting.

“As we patiently await the results of the R.C.V. tabulation including all absentee ballots,” the memo said, “the Garcia campaign should remain confident in our path to victory.”

The likely makeup of the next City Council will become clearer on Tuesday when the Board of Elections releases new ranked-choice results that are expected to include a significant number of absentee ballots.

More than half the members of the City Council will vacate their seats at the end of the year, largely because of term limits preventing them from running for re-election. Most, though not all, of the incumbents who were seeking re-election cruised to an easy victory on Primary Day.

But the outcome of the Democratic primary races for most of the open seats remained uncertain. On Friday night, the Board of Elections released a preliminary ranked-choice tabulation in every Council primary. The results did not include absentee ballots, but they offer the clearest picture yet of the city’s incoming legislative body.

If the results from Friday night hold, women are expected to make up a majority of the City Council for the first time in the city’s history. At the end of ranked-choice tabulations, women were leading in 29 of the 51 Democratic primaries.

Still, the margins in some of those contests currently appear slim, and absentee ballots will be key in the ultimate outcome.

In District 32, where Democrats hope to flip the last Republican seat in Queens, Felicia Singh, a teacher backed by the Working Families Party, was up by just 405 votes over Michael Scala, a lawyer, in the final round. The winner in that race will face off against Joann Ariola, who won the Republican primary, in November.

In District 18 in the Bronx, Amanda Farias, a community organizer, was behind William Rivera, the district manager of a Bronx community board, by 119 first-choice votes. But after five rounds, Ms. Farias had picked up enough support from voters who originally selected other candidates that she finished ahead by 252 votes.

Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a slight lead in the mayoral race after the in-person ballots were tabulated. He ran as a “blue-collar” New Yorker, and picked up significant support in the city’s working-class neighborhoods, especially in Brooklyn and the Bronx.

Mr. Adams, a former police officer, hovered near the lead in polls for most of primary campaign before jumping ahead at the end as he focused his message on improving public safety without violating the rights of Black and Latino New Yorkers.

During the campaign, Mr. Adams, 60, focused heavily on his biography as someone who grew up poor in Brooklyn and Queens and was abused by the police as a teenager, but then decided to join the department.

He rose to become a captain and for years was a vocal critic of discriminatory policing and a fierce advocate for Black officers, often infuriating his superiors. In 2006, he retired from the New York Police Department to run a successful campaign for State Senate. He was later elected borough president, taking office in 2014.

Kathryn Garcia, 51, the former sanitation commissioner, trailed Eric Adams after in-person votes were counted. After beginning her campaign in relative obscurity, she surged late in the race, and early election results show her winning most of Manhattan, as well as pockets of Brooklyn.

Ms. Garcia’s campaign was based on the idea that her long experience in city government made her the ideal person to lead New York to recovery. She maintained she was the go-to crisis manager that Mayor Bill de Blasio called on to handle everything from lead paint in public housing to the emergency distribution of food during the pandemic.

In the last days of the race, she campaigned with Andrew Yang, the tech entrepreneur who had been the front-runner early in the contest. The move seems to have helped Ms. Garcia pick up support from Yang voters.

Without evidence, Mr. Adams and his supporters characterized the alliance as an effort to stop Black and Latino officials from being elected, a charge Ms. Garcia rejected.

Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio and a former commentator on MSNBC, is in third place by a small margin after the early rounds of ranked-choice voting tabulation.

As the leading progressive candidate in the race, she drew support from pockets of the city dominated by younger and left-leaning voters, like the East Village in Manhattan and Williamsburg in Brooklyn.

Ms. Wiley, 57, was able to unify progressive Democrats in the city after the collapse of the campaigns of two other left-leaning candidates: Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller, and Dianne Morales, a nonprofit executive.

During the campaign, Ms. Wiley was a strong critic of Eric Adams, the front-runner and a former police in the New York Police Department, on the issue of policing. She rejected Mr. Adams’s idea that often-criticized police tactics like stop and frisk and plainclothes police squads can help keep New Yorkers safe without violating their civil rights.

Her campaign pledged to take at least $1 billion from the Police Department budget and use the money for education, mental health and social services programs intended to reduce crime.