After months of campaigning, election day finally came to New York on Tuesday, with a Democratic party primary vote likely to decide the city’s next mayor.
Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to vote in the contest, with Eric Adams, a former police officer, leading the polls.
But with ranked choice voting being used for the first time in a New York mayoral election, there is still plenty of hope for the other candidates, and with the official result not expected to be announced until July, plenty of time until New Yorkers learn the name of their next leader.
Voting was slow at Dutch Kills high school, in Long Island City, on Tuesday morning, as a trickle of Queens residents arrived to cast their ballots, although with polls open until 9pm, and early voting having been in progress since 12 June, a large turnout was still expected.
Min Kwon, 26, voted for Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer who has emerged as the leading progressive candidate in recent weeks.
“Her stance on the police department, defunding it significantly, is one thing I really like about her,” Kwon said, adding that he supported Wiley’s positions on LGBTQ+ rights, housing rights and racial justice.
Dianne Morales, a progressive former non-profit leader and fellow police critic, but whose campaign has been derailed by infighting, was his second choice.
An election season that began with calls for at least partially defunding the New York’s police department has pivoted in recent weeks, as a spike in shootings swung the debate in the opposite direction and helped to propel Adams, a centrist who has criticized the “defund the police” movement, and supports the widely loathed stop-and-frisk policing tactic, to the top of the polls.
Wiley has avoided using the term “defund the police”, but would cut at least $1bn from the NYPD’s budget – which was $5.8bn last year, its highest ever – and shift the money to social programs and mental health workers.
Most candidates have pitched policies to attempt to curb police brutality, although they differ on how that would be achieved.
“I don’t think the police force here in New York has to be as big as it is right now. Especially for the homeless situation, mental illness, or other things like that, there are other resources that we can divert police funds to to help that,” Kwon said.
Kwon said when choosing his candidate he asked himself: “When do I actually feel safe when police are nearby? And I don’t feel safe when police are nearby, especially as a person of color.”
About 800,000 people are expected to vote in the Democratic primary, according to the New York Times, which would be an increase from the last competitive mayoral primary in 2013. Given the leftward political leanings of the city, the winner of the primary will almost certainly win the election proper in November.
Cali Howitt, 39, voted for Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner for New York who has risen in the polls after being endorsed by the New York Times and the New York Daily News.
“I like her experience,” Howitt said.
“I feel like we need someone who is experienced even though we need a change from what we currently have, I want somebody in there that has experience in the government and knows how it runs, and isn’t coming out of nowhere basically.”
Howitt selected Sean Donovan, a secretary of housing and urban development in the Obama administration, as her second choice – “for essentially the same reasons”, she said – and was pleased with the introduction of ranked choice voting.
“I really like it because your vote counts even when your first person has been knocked out of the race,” she said.
Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur and 2020 long-shot candidate for president, led the polls for weeks before Adams emerged as the top contender in May. The final polling suggest Adams has opened up a gap on his rivals, with Wiley, Garcia and Yang running close behind.
Given the introduction of ranked choice, however, coupled with the use of mail-in ballots, it is likely to be some time before a victor is declared.
On Tuesday night, the winner of the early voting and on-the-day ballots should be revealed, before mail-in vote counting, and then second-choice and potentially third, fourth and fifth-choice voting, continues.
By 12 July, after months of electioneering, and weeks after primary day, New York City residents should finally know the identity of their next mayor.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
