Eric Adams had a lead of one percentage point over his nearest rival, Kathryn Garcia, in the race for the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City, according to a new count on Tuesday that included tens of thousands of absentee ballots.
With most absentee votes now slated to be accounted for, Mr. Adams led Ms. Garcia by 8,426 votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, the city’s first mayoral contest to be determined by ranked-choice voting.
Maya Wiley, who emerged late in the primary as a left-wing standard-bearer, ended up in third place in the tally released on Tuesday. She had come in second place in the initial count of in-person ballots cast on Primary Day and during the early vote period.
The results, which have not been finalized, followed a remarkable stretch in the city’s political history: the race began in a pandemic and took multiple unexpected twists in the final weeks. Most recently, it was colored by a vote-tallying debacle at the Board of Elections.
There are still some ballots left to account for, and it was not immediately clear on Tuesday whether any of the contenders would mount legal challenges as the race neared its conclusion. All three leading candidates had filed to maintain that option.
The winner of the Democratic nomination will be the overwhelming favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee and the founder of the Guardian Angels.
Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, leads the race for to become the Democratic candidate for New York City’s mayor, according to a new count released on Tuesday evening.
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.
A Board of Elections official said Tuesday that she expected the mayoral primary to be certified by July 14, once voters have been given the chance to “cure” as many as 3,699 defective ballots.
“Once those total cures are received — and of course, if they all come back sooner than July 14 — we will move with certification,” Dawn Sandow, the deputy executive director of the Board of Elections, said during the board’s weekly meeting.
Ms. Sandow’s new deadline on the board came as the board missed yet another opportunity to demonstrate its ability to keep to a self-imposed schedule.
On Tuesday, the board’s Twitter account cheekily promised a new, possibly definitive round of results by “more brunch special vs. club hours.” But as late morning turned to afternoon and afternoon to early evening, the board announced that in fact it hoped to release the new results by 7:30 p.m. In fact, they came out a little before 6:45 p.m.
The new tally includes most absentee votes and is therefore expected to be more definitive than the tally released last week — which included none of the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots and was itself delayed by a day after the board accidentally included more than 130,000 extra test ballots in the total it released to the public, and then deleted from its website.
The board released corrected results the following day, but the damage to public confidence in the board was done. On Tuesday, Ms. Sandow called the reporting error “unacceptable.”
“We apologize to the voters of our great city for this error,” Ms. Sandow said.
Her apologetic tone differed from the tenor of an email she sent to staff last Thursday, in which the board’s executive team adopted a defiant posture.
“The amount of changes thrown at us to implement in a short period of time during a worldwide pandemic was unsurmountable and WE DID IT ALL SUCCESSFULLY!” the email, signed by “The Executive Management Team,” read. “The media, the public nor the elected officials will ever take that away from us.”
For the first time, the Board of Elections implemented ranked-choice voting in a mayoral election. The board is using open-source software to perform the successive rounds of tabulation required by this type of voting, and it ignored requests from the software developer to assist in the vote count before last week’s debacle.
On Tuesday, Ms. Sandow suggested that the board’s mistake arose from competing aims.
“The process we followed was transparent and open,” she said. “We were trying to satisfy expectations of quick results with a new way of voting. What we can say with certainty, this issue caused no votes to be lost, no voter disenfranchised and no incorrect results to be certified.”
With one of the most competitive mayor’s races in recent memory and a number of hotly contested down-ballot primaries, the turnout in last month’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City was the strongest in years.
So far, the Board of Elections has counted the ballots of about 820,000 registered Democrats who voted in-person in the mayoral primary. As of Friday, an additional 125,794 Democratic absentee ballots had been returned, likely bringing the turnout to at least 945,000 voters.
That means that roughly 26 percent of the city’s 3.7 million registered Democrats voted in the mayoral primary this year — which is higher than, say, the 22 percent that voted in 2013, the last time there was a wide-open mayoral race. Bill de Blasio ended up prevailing.
However, the turnout was low by historical standards; a number of bitterly fought races in the 1970s and 1980s drew more voters.
The Democrats’ choice will be the overwhelming favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, who won the Republican primary with even lower turnout.
The elections board has tallied about 55,000 in-person votes from Republicans, and another 5,800 absentee ballots have been returned. That total of 60,800 ballots accounts for about 10 percent of the city’s registered Republicans.
These days, when error or scandal hits big organizations, a degree of sympathy goes out to the keepers of their social-media accounts, often young, poorly paid or both, who stand on the front lines and face the public’s wrath.
The Twitter account for New York City’s Board of Elections, @BOENYC, is no exception. Since the board released incorrect preliminary results last Tuesday in the high-stakes race to choose the city’s next mayor, the account has been its most visible conduit to the public. The account has not fared well.
It has posted intermittent, incomplete updates and explanations. It has set deadlines for releasing new information, only to have the board break them again and again and then post important news late at night and without warning. It even posted an apology that seemed to be written — like a mea culpa thumb-typed by a wayward social-media influencer — using the iPhone Notes app.
@BOENYC’s mentions have been flooded with ridicule, though also the occasional dash of empathy. At one point, when a commenter offered “thoughts and prayers,” the account responded with a thank-you emoji, prompting another round of cheers, jeers and pity, from “You ain’t good at this if you think responding to this tweet is good form” to “the sweetest tweet ever.”
On Tuesday, New York media Twitter found itself in a sideshow frenzy over the account’s latest attempt at levity: It promised new partial voting results would come out closer to “brunch special” than to “club hours.”
That was at 8:48 a.m. As the day wore on, a robust discussion broke out over when brunch could be said to end; in any case, as of 4:30 p.m., the outside edge of brunch hours in New York City for even the most hung over, the board had yet to release results.
Then, at 5:09 p.m., @BOENYC surfaced with a new tweet that extended brunch into dinner time. The new results, it said, could be out “by 7:30 p.m. tonight”
We promise today’s release is more brunch special vs. club hours.
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) July 6, 2021
There was a growing sense that folksy, self-deprecating posts ought to come along with transparency, not instead of it — especially given the seriousness of the stakes. New Yorkers are choosing a leader who will be tasked with overseeing the city’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, in the first major election using the city’s new system of ranked-choice voting, amid a national crisis over trust in the reliability of reported facts in general and in the integrity of elections in particular.
There was also a hint that the operator of the Twitter account might not be a lowly intern after all, but instead the board’s hard-to-reach communications director, Valerie Vazquez.
Social media person seems so impersonal…you can call me your pal Val!
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) July 4, 2021
Asked in a text message whether she was the animating intelligence behind @BOENYC, Ms. Vazquez did not immediately respond.
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.
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