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      What to Know About the Vote Tally Fiasco

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Thursday. Weather: Cooler and partly sunny, with a high in the mid-80s, but afternoon thunderstorms could bring gusty wind and heavy rain. Alternate-side parking: In effect until Sunday (Independence Day). Dave Sanders for The New York TimesThe goal was to offer additional insight into the mayor’s race. The result was a mess.After New York City’s Board of Elections retracted a tally of ranked-choice votes because of a significant error, a new tabulation was released yesterday. The unofficial count suggested a tight race was in store among the Democratic candidates Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley.The corrected results, however, did not end lingering questions over the initial mistake — the latest debacle in a history of blunders at the Board of Elections — and whether it would affect voters’ faith in the elections process.[Read more about the results and the initial issues with the tabulation.]Here’s what to know:The updated resultsThe corrected ranked-choice exercise showed Mr. Adams edging out Ms. Garcia by about two percentage points, or 14,755 votes, in the final round. Ms. Wiley finished in third place, but was less than 350 votes behind Ms. Garcia before being eliminated.The sample playoff process suggests that the race may end in a tight heat. But both the numbers and standings of the top three could all be shaken up as roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots are counted.An official result is not expected for weeks.The chaosAfter the initial tally on Tuesday, some people quickly noticed the total count of votes was significantly higher than the overall number during early voting and Primary Day.About seven hours later, the Board of Elections said it had mistakenly included about 135,000 test ballots in the tabulation.The falloutThe updated outcome did not differ significantly despite the error. But details that emerged on Wednesday shed new light on the mistake.The supplier of the open-source software that the city used to tabulate votes repeatedly offered its assistance, according to Christopher W. Hughes, the policy director at the provider, the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. But he told my colleague Dana Rubinstein that he did not hear back.The slip-up reignited demands for meaningful reform at the elections board, long criticized for ineptitude and a lack of accountability. It was far from the first botched process. Last year, for example, about 100,000 New Yorkers received defective absentee ballots.The State Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said that legislators would hold hearings on the situation and that they should move to quickly pass voting reforms.From The TimesNew York Adopts Record $99 Billion Budget to Aid Pandemic RecoveryActress Who Recruited Women for Nxivm Sentenced to 3 Years in PrisonTrump Organization and Top Executive Are Indicted in Tax InvestigationThe Reincarnation of N.Y.C. RestaurantsWith ‘Summer of Soul,’ Questlove Wants to Fill a Cultural VoidThe Oldest Museum in New York Is ExpandingWant more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingGov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that a monument honoring essential workers would be created in Battery Park City, and some residents have pushed back. [Gothamist]Several New York natives are missing after the collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Fla. Here is one of their stories. [Daily News]The city will reimburse taxi or other car expenses for homeless children and students with disabilities coming home from summer school programs. [Chalkbeat New York]And finally: Hunting for sculptures in augmented reality Arthur Lubow writes:On a torrid afternoon in June, Emma Enderby, chief curator of the Shed, and Cecilia Alemani, director and chief curator of High Line Art, walked side by side between their respective bailiwicks on the West Side of Manhattan, plotting the configuration of their first collaborative exhibition.They were exultant.“No night install,” Alemani said. “No cranes. That’s the best.”Nothing would be decided until right before the opening. “We didn’t have to think about engineering or weight loads,” Enderby said. “You can just spend a leisurely day placing them.”The exhibition, “The Looking Glass,” which runs from Saturday through Aug. 29, is a show in which all of “them” — the sculptures on view — are virtual, existing only in augmented reality, or A.R.Using an app developed by Acute Art, a London-based digital-art organization, a spectator can point a phone at a QR code displayed at one of the sites — the giveaway of where a virtual artwork is “hidden.”The code activates a specific sculpture to appear on the viewer’s camera screen, superimposed on the surroundings. (Unlike virtual reality, or V.R., in which a viewer wears a device, such as goggles, A.R. does not require total immersion.)Most of the virtual art will be placed on the plaza surrounding the Shed, on West 30th Street at 11th Avenue, supplemented by three locations on the nearby High Line.Acute Art is supervised by the third curator of the exhibition, Daniel Birnbaum, who, because of the pandemic, could only be present remotely. “The Looking Glass” is an updated and expanded reprise of another Acute Art show, “Unreal City,” which opened on the South Bank of London last year and then, in the face of new lockdown precautions, resurfaced in a monthlong at-home version.A teaser, with three of “The Looking Glass” artists, was presented last month at Frieze New York at the Shed.“There is something charming about it being secret or not completely visible,” Birnbaum said in a phone interview. “It is a totally invisible show until you start talking about it.”It’s Thursday — look around.Metropolitan Diary: Stranded in the ’70s Dear Diary:It was a beautiful spring Saturday in the 1970s. I had driven into the city from New Jersey for the day and was on the Upper West Side when my car started to sputter.I stopped at a gas station, and the guy there said they could look at it, but not until Monday. So now I had to get back to New Jersey, but I had spent almost all the money I’d brought with me for the day. I only had 75 cents left — not even enough for a bus home.I decided to call a friend who could, hopefully, come and get me. I saw a green phone booth outside a bar at the corner of 78th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.Picking up the receiver, I noticed that it was unusually big and heavy. This is one really old phone, I thought to myself.I dropped my last three quarters into the phone, but I didn’t get a dial tone. The phone was dead and now I had no money left.I went into the bar, where the bartender chuckled and said the phone outside was a prop. It was for a scene in “The Goodbye Girl,” which was being filmed on the block.He gave me a few quarters. I dropped them into the bar’s pay phone and called my friend. Then I settled in to wait, and watched Marsha Mason do about a dozen takes on the street outside.— Doug JoswickNew York Today is published weekdays around 6 a.m. Sign up here to get it by email. You can also find it at nytoday.com. More

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      N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race Remains Tight With Adams Leading in Revised Tally

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      Eric Adams kept his lead in a new tally of ranked-choice preferences, after the Board of Elections scrapped the results of an earlier count.A day after New York City’s Board of Elections sowed confusion in the Democratic mayoral primary by releasing new tallies and then retracting them, it issued a new preliminary tally of votes suggesting that the race between Eric Adams, the primary night leader, and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.According to Wednesday’s nonbinding tally, Mr. Adams led Kathryn Garcia by just 14,755 votes, a margin of around 2 percentage points, in the final round. Maya Wiley, who came in second place in the initial vote count, barely trailed Ms. Garcia after the preliminary elimination rounds were completed: Fewer than 350 votes separated the two.But in reality, all of those candidates remain in contention, and those numbers could be scrambled again as the city’s Board of Elections tabulates ranked-choice outcomes that will include roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots, with a fuller result not expected until mid-July.While campaign officials and some New Yorkers were engrossed in the emerging results, the count was nearly overshadowed by the vote-tallying debacle that drew national attention and stoked concerns about whether voters will have faith in the city’s electoral process.The fiasco stemmed from an egregious error by the Board of Elections: Roughly 135,000 sample ballots, used to test the city’s new ranked-choice system, had been mistakenly counted. The board was forced to retract the results from a tabulation of ranked-choice preferences, just hours after it had published them on Tuesday.The board on Wednesday eventually released the results of a second tally of ranked-choice preferences among Democrats who voted in person last Tuesday or during the early voting period.Those results, which do not account for the tens of thousands of absentee ballots, echoed the findings briefly released on Tuesday: Mr. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a much narrower lead than the one he held on primary night, when only the first-choice preferences were counted.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 more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, 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.History suggests it is very difficult, but not impossible, for a candidate who trails in an initial round to ultimately win a ranked-choice race.Eric Adams retained his first-place primary night position, but two of his nearest rivals narrowed the gap.James Estrin/The New York TimesThe new numbers offered a snapshot of the kinds of coalitions the contenders were able to build.Ms. Garcia, who spent the final days of the race campaigning with Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, clearly benefited when he was eliminated in the ranked-choice exercise. She moved from third place into second, edging past Ms. Wiley, though Mr. Adams benefited when Mr. Yang was eliminated as well.Mr. Yang had made clear that Ms. Garcia was his second choice, and the two had formed an apparent alliance, appearing together on campaign literature and in public, particularly in neighborhoods with significant Asian American populations.Ms. Garcia also took the vast majority of Ms. Wiley’s votes when Ms. Wiley was eliminated in the exercise. Either candidate would be the city’s first female mayor.They and Mr. Adams stressed the importance of ensuring that voters can maintain faith in the city’s electoral process as the Board of Elections tabulates the results. The candidates also noted the importance of the coming absentee ballot tabulations.“With more than 120,000 absentee ballots left to count — in addition to provisional ballots and potential recanvassing of results — this election is still wide open,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement. “That’s why following yesterday’s embarrassing debacle, the Board of Elections must count every vote in an open way so that New Yorkers can have confidence that their votes are being counted accurately.”Even before the chaotic display on Tuesday, the elections board had already faced criticism over its decision to reveal some ranked-choice results without factoring in absentee votes.A number of strategists and officials warned that such a move could fuel voter confusion, especially if there is a different winner once absentee ballots are added in. Results will not be certified until all ballots, including absentee votes, are accounted for, a process that is expected to stretch well into next month.“While we remain confident in our path to victory, we are taking nothing for granted and encourage everyone to patiently wait for over 124,000 absentee ballots to be counted and included in the ranked choice voting tabulation,” Ms. Garcia said in a statement. “Every candidate should respect the democratic process and be committed to supporting whomever the voters have selected to be the Democratic nominee for mayor.”Mr. Adams’s campaign struck a similar note, saying in a statement that there were “still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric — and we are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied.”Tuesday’s extraordinary counting error comes not long after a 2020 presidential campaign in which Republicans sought to sow unfounded doubts about the integrity of the election and promoted false claims of voter fraud.And the confusion surrounding the primary results in New York prompted former President Donald J. Trump to weigh in, claiming without evidence that “nobody will ever know who really won.”Mr. Adams shot back on Twitter: “As always, Trump gets it wrong.”“Yesterday, the results released by the B.O.E. had discrepancies which are being addressed,” he said. “There were NO similar issues in November. Neither of these elections were a hoax or a scam. We need to count every vote. That takes time, and that’s OK.”In a statement Wednesday evening, the commissioners of the board apologized for the uncertainty and noted new tabulation safeguards, while stressing that the problems were not tied to the ranked-choice process.“We have implemented another layer of review and quality control before publishing information going forward,” the statement said.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,” it stated.Still, Tuesday’s developments gave more impetus to long-stalled efforts to bring meaningful reforms to the Board of Elections. The State Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, said in a statement that the legislative body should move urgently to pass voting reforms.“The situation in New York City is a national embarrassment and must be dealt with promptly and properly,” said Ms. Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat. “In the coming weeks, the Senate will be holding hearings on this situation and will seek to pass reform legislation as a result at the earliest opportunity.”A spokeswoman for Assemblywoman Latrice Walker, the chairwoman of the Committee on Election Law, said that the committee would be holding a hearing on ranked-choice voting.Maya Wiley characterized the Board of Elections’ mistake as an “embarrassing debacle.” Hilary Swift for The New York TimesThe counting error was the latest episode in a long series of blunders and other dysfunction at the Board of Elections, and the recriminations began nearly instantly.Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday called for a total overhaul of the body.“Yet again, the fundamental structural flaws of the Board of Elections are on display,” he said in a statement, also calling for “an immediate, complete recanvass” of the vote count and “a clear explanation of what went wrong.”“Going forward,” he said, “there must be a complete structural rebuild of the board.”And Mr. Adams’s campaign announced that it had filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn.“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 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.”Ms. Garcia’s campaign indicated in a statement that it was filing in court as well, to preserve “our 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.Separately, Mr. Adams and some of his allies have long expressed concerns about the ranked-choice voting process, which voters approved in a 2019 ballot measure. Some of Mr. Adams’s surrogates have cast ranked choice as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, a characterization that supporters of the process strongly reject.But the bulk of the critical focus on Wednesday fell on the Board of Elections, as new details emerged about the circumstances that led to what the board insists was a human error.For example, the supplier of the software that New York City used to tabulate votes repeatedly offered its assistance to the board, according to Christopher W. Hughes, the policy director at the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, which provided the open-source software.He did not hear back.Dana Rubinstein, Ed Shanahan and Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting. More

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      Inside the Turmoil at the Agency That Is Running Ranked-Choice Voting

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      The Board of Elections, which has a history of mishaps, is now under intense fire for its error in releasing mayoral primary results.As New Yorkers began to cast ballots in the first citywide election with ranked-choice voting, turmoil quietly roiled the government agency overseeing the election.The agency, the New York City Board of Elections, had lost its executive director and one of his top deputies just weeks before early voting. It was being pressured to change its plan for releasing results.And as Primary Day approached on June 22, the board’s remaining leaders had repeatedly declined help with the ranked-choice software and delayed training for employees, creating confusion among the staff.On Tuesday, as the city eagerly awaited results in the mayoral primary and other major races, the problems burst into public view when the agency released preliminary ranked-choice vote totals — only to retract them hours later, acknowledging that they were no longer trustworthy.Officials explained that the board had mistakenly included more than 130,000 test ballots in the preliminary count. A new ranked-choice tally was run on Wednesday, and the top-line results were unchanged: Eric Adams, who had the most first-place votes on primary night, was still the first choice, but by a far narrower numerical margin over his closest rival, Kathryn Garcia.The results, however, seemed almost anticlimactic, with the memory of Tuesday’s snafu still causing outrage across the city and renewing calls for changes at the elections board. It also resurrected long-held frustrations about the barriers that have persistently blocked reforms at the agency, despite decades of blunders and scandals.“It’s just one fiasco after another, year after year,” said Lulu Friesdat, executive director of Smart Elections, an elections reform group. “The fact that we haven’t made the effort to change that is shocking. It’s appalling.”New York is the only state in the country with local election boards whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses. The system is meant to ensure fairness by empowering the parties to watch each other, but for decades the board in New York City has been criticized for nepotism, ineptitude and corruption.In recent years, the political appointees who run the board have stumbled again and again. They mistakenly purged about 200,000 people from voter rolls ahead of the 2016 election; they forced some voters to wait in four-hour lines on Election Day 2018; and they sent erroneous ballots to nearly 100,000 New Yorkers seeking to vote by mail last year.Still, while some lawmakers have suggested reforms, the proposals have failed to gain much traction. The structure of the election board is enshrined in the New York State Constitution, so it is hard to change, and political leaders have little incentive to support any reforms because the current system gives them a lot of power.The snafu in ranked-choice results created outrage across the city.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, facing anger and ridicule from across the political spectrum — including in a statement sent by former President Donald J. Trump — leaders in the New York State Senate and Assembly vowed to hold hearings to finally tackle problems at the board.“The situation in New York City is a national embarrassment and must be dealt with promptly and properly,” said Andrea Stewart-Cousins, a Democrat who leads the Senate, in a statement. “In the coming weeks, the Senate will be holding hearings on this situation and will seek to pass reform legislation as a result at the earliest opportunity.”Even as lawmakers promised reforms, the board acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that it had been operating through the election season without much of its leadership team.Michael Ryan, who has served as the board’s executive director since 2013, has been on medical leave since early March, and Pamela Perkins, the agency’s administrative manager, retired on June 1 after nearly two decades in the position, a spokeswoman confirmed.The New York Post reported Mr. Ryan’s medical leave earlier Wednesday.Wilma Brown Phillips, who was chosen to succeed Ms. Perkins, started the job on Monday, meaning the board did not have an administrative manager on Primary Day.In the absence of Mr. Ryan and Ms. Perkins, both Democrats, day-to-day operations were effectively run by the board’s two top Republicans, Dawn Sandow and Georgea Kontzamanis.Ms. Sandow 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.The leadership vacuum — during an intense election, with a new method of voting — caused tumult at the board for months, several employees said.As the board dealt with those issues, it also ignored offers of technological assistance from the supplier of the software that it would use to tabulate the ranked-choice votes.The supplier, Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center, first offered to help on May 26 and then tried again several times, said its policy director, Christopher W. Hughes.“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. Doing so would have made it more likely that they would have caught the test ballots that were inadvertently added to the tally on Tuesday, he said.Valerie Vazquez-Diaz, a spokeswoman for the elections board, declined to address the substance of Mr. Hughes’s 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-Diaz 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.His original proposal set out a budget of $90,000 for assistance through 2025, at the cost of $100 or $150 an hour. But he did not hear back, even after trying again on June 2, June 14 and finally, June 21, the day before the primary.The organization’s software was used last year in 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.Delays plagued the plan to train staff in the software used for ranked-choice voting.Dave Sanders for The New York TimesThe board also got a late start in testing the software to generate the ranked-choice results because of an impasse with the State Board of Elections that took more than a year to resolve. As recently as a month before the election, the board still faced the possibility of having to count hundreds of thousands of ballots by hand.Only on May 25 did the state board give a green light to the city board’s preferred software package, known as the Universal Ranked-Choice Voting Tabulator.Douglas Kellner, the co-chairman of the state Board of Elections, said the delay was caused by the city election board itself, as well as resistance from Republicans on the state board.“The city Board of Elections had other priorities, that was one issue,” Mr. Kellner said. “And when they finally got around to saying, ‘We have a ranked-choice voting election next year,’ the Republicans at the state Board of Elections started dragging their feet, because they question whether the city even had the authority to amend the charter to provide for this system of voting. So that added several months of additional delay.”Delays also plagued the plan to train employees on the software and ranked-choice voting itself, workers said. Two employees said they did not receive training until after early voting had already begun.A final challenge emerged when the board leaders struggled to decide how and when to release the results of the ranked-choice voting.The board always planned to release only the results of first-choice votes by early voters and in-person voters on primary night. Initially, it planned to then wait until it had received all the absentee votes to conduct the instant runoff enabled by the ranked-choice part of the election.However, officials had received pressure to release results earlier, including from Councilman Brad Lander, who proposed legislation last December to require earlier reporting. Some supporters of ranked-choice voting pushed to make raw voting data public early on, in part because they feared that if the absentee votes changed the results, critics would blame ranked-choice voting.At the last minute — just a few days before Primary Day, employees said — the board settled on a compromise: It would release the results of an instant runoff just for the early votes and in-person voters, as something of a test of the system. That was the release on Tuesday, which was calculated erroneously and sparked the outrage.The debate about when to release results surfaced as early as December, at an oversight hearing of the City Council.At that hearing, Councilman Fernando Cabrera opened with a warning that now sounds prescient.“2021 is the biggest year for local races in recent memory, with open contests for all citywide offices and two-thirds of the City Council seats,” he said. “We cannot afford to get this wrong.”Michael Rothfeld More

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      The N.Y.C. Board of Elections Has a Long History of Blunders

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      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.” More

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      What to Expect as Early Ranked-Choice Results Are Released in New York

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      Absentee ballots won’t be included, but data to be released Tuesday could signal the way vote totals will shift as the field is officially winnowed.New Yorkers will get one step closer on Tuesday to learning who their next mayor is likely to be.Because an initial count of ballots showed that none of the Democratic candidates got more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes cast by those who voted in person last Tuesday or during the early voting period, the city’s new ranked-choice system has kicked in.Voters could rank up to five candidates in the mayor’s race, and the Democratic nominee, who is almost certain to be next mayor, will now be decided through a process of elimination that begins on Tuesday.Here’s what you need to know:How will the ranked-choice system play out on Tuesday?The city’s Board of Elections is set to reveal the first, preliminary round of ranked-choice results, which will give a fuller, if still incomplete, picture of how the vote totals are shaking out.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya D. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted, and he was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 percentage points.A winner will not be certified on Tuesday, in part because tens of thousands of absentee ballots will not be included in the preliminary tally. It is also difficult, but mathematically possible, for either Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia to catch Mr. Adams.The elimination rounds work like this: The candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated. Those votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom his or her voters ranked second. The candidate in last place after that reallocation is then eliminated, with their votes reallocated to second choices, and so on, until two candidates remain. The one with the most votes is the winner.Voters casting their ballots on Primary Day at a public school in Upper Manhattan. An initial ranked-choice tally to be released on Tuesday could indicate which candidates had the broadest appeal.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesAre the elimination-round results final?Not yet.What will happen on Tuesday is essentially an exercise: It will show only who would win based on votes that have already been tallied — that is, who would win if, hypothetically, there were no absentee ballots. Later, after absentee ballots have been counted, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of elimination rounds — the real ones, for the final result.The initial ranked-choice tally may still offer an important snapshot of which candidates had the broadest appeal, as well as insight into how voters grouped, or excluded, certain candidates.As of Monday, there were around 124,000 outstanding Democratic absentee ballots that had not been counted, and more might still trickle in until the deadline on Tuesday.On July 6, there will be a fresh round of results that is expected to include some absentee ballots, and a more complete set of results is expected the following week.What other ranked-choice voting results will be released on Tuesday?The tally will include results for all races in which ranked-choice voting was used, including mayor, comptroller and City Council.In the Democratic primary for comptroller, Brad Lander, a councilman from Brooklyn, leads Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, by almost 9 percentage points. Mr. Lander has said he looks forward to seeing the tabulation process play out.“Democracy is worth waiting for and we’re looking forward to seeing the ranked vote tabulation tomorrow,” Mr. Lander said.Jumaane Williams has been declared the winner in the public advocate primary.No winner has been declared in the six competitive primaries — five Democratic, one Republican — for borough president, but several candidates received close to, or more than, 40 percent of first-choice votes. Dozens of Democratic City Council primary races also remain undecided.Kathryn Garcia’s campaign expects to gain ground when absentee ballots are counted.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesMaya Wiley trailed Mr. Adams by 9.4 percentage points after the first tally of votes.Hilary Swift for The New York TimesDoes Eric Adams have an insurmountable lead?In most ranked-choice elections in the United States, whoever wins the most first-place votes ends up the final winner. But it is not unprecedented for a candidate trailing in first-place votes after an initial tally to get enough second- and third-place votes to surmount the gap.In a 2018 congressional race in Maine, a Democrat, Jared Golden, defeated a Republican front-runner after votes for independent candidates were reallocated to him. And in a mayoral race in Oakland in 2010, the front-running incumbent lost after the elimination rounds reallocated votes to the eventual winner, Jean Quan.In any case, the New York City mayor’s race is not over. A range of political observers say the final difference between the top two finishers will likely be closer than Mr. Adams’s 9-point lead after the first round of counting.The campaigns of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley have been busy with calculators, maps of voter-turnout results and various polls hinting at what share of other candidates’ votes will go to each of them and to Mr. Adams.The data, they have said, suggests the race is tighter than it looks after the initial ballot tally, and that one of them could still win.A new study by the group Data For Progress suggests that Ms. Garcia can still beat Mr. Adams, and that the gap between him and Ms. Wiley could be within the study’s margin of error.The study sought to combine voters’ professed ranking patterns with their actual first-choice votes: Pollsters asked 601 likely voters on Primary Day how they planned to rank, or had ranked, candidates and then weighted the results to the first-place votes counted so far.Ms. Garcia’s campaign, according to a memo shared last week, expects her to gain considerable ground in the absentee ballot count, because those ballots have been received in higher numbers in districts where she beat both Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley — districts where in-person turnout was also very high.Campaign advisers for Ms. Wiley last week mapped out how she could prevail in the elimination rounds. Their path to victory, essentially, requires Ms. Garcia to get many of Andrew Yang’s second-choice votes, and Ms. Wiley to get many of Ms. Garcia’s.As Ms. Wiley’s advisers saw it: The top three rivals and Mr. Yang would split the lower-ranking candidates’ votes, with Ms. Wiley picking up a large share from Scott M. Stringer, the city comptroller. Once Mr. Yang is eliminated, Ms. Wiley would get few of his votes, but Ms. Garcia, they believed, would get many, especially in the heavily Asian American districts where she campaigned with Mr. Yang in the final days. If Ms. Wiley then led Ms. Garcia, she might inherit enough of her votes to take the lead.The conclusion, as one Wiley adviser, Jon Paul Lupo, put it, was that “we’re in a nail-biter.”So when will we know the results of the mayor’s race?The Board of Elections is confident that it will be able to certify the results of the entire election, including ranked-choice voting contests and non-ranked contests like races for district attorney and judges, starting the week of July 12.Under changes to election rules that were passed last year, voters are allowed to “cure” or correct errors with mail-in ballot envelopes that might prevent their ballots from being counted. The deadline for receiving cured ballots is July 9.After the board receives those ballots, they will run the ranked-choice voting software again the week of July 12. The results will be used to create the official report for certification.The Associated Press will be closely watching the results that the board releases, said David Scott, the organization’s vice president and managing editor.“Our standard is the same as in any election,” he said in an interview. “We will call it when we are confident the trailing candidates can’t catch up.” More

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      The Surprising Places in NYC Where Trump’s Support Grew

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      }
      }

      .nytslm_outerContainer {
      display: flex;
      align-items: center;
      /* Fixes IE */
      overflow-x: auto;
      box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15);
      padding: 10px 1.25em 10px;
      transition: all 250ms;
      -ms-overflow-style: none;
      /* IE 10+ */
      scrollbar-width: none;
      /* Firefox */
      background: white;
      margin-bottom: 20px;
      z-index: 1000;
      }

      @media (min-width: 1024px) {
      .nytslm_outerContainer {
      margin-bottom: 0px;
      padding: 13px 1.25em 10px;
      }
      }

      .nytslm::-webkit-scrollbar {
      display: none;
      /* Safari and Chrome */
      }

      .nytslm_innerContainer {
      margin: unset;
      display: flex;
      align-items: center;
      }

      @media (min-width: 600px) {
      .nytslm_innerContainer {
      margin: auto;
      min-width: 600px;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_title {
      padding-right: 1em;
      border-right: 1px solid #ccc;
      }

      @media (min-width: 740px) {
      .nytslm_title {
      max-width: none;
      font-size: 1.0625rem;
      line-height: 1.25rem;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_spacer {
      width: 0;
      border-right: 1px solid #E2E2E2;
      height: 45px;
      margin: 0 1.4em;
      }

      .nytslm_list {
      font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
      display: flex;
      width: auto;
      list-style: none;
      padding-left: 1em;
      flex-shrink: 0;
      align-items: baseline;
      justify-content: center;
      }

      .nytslm_li {
      margin-right: 1.4em;
      flex-shrink: 0;
      font-size: 0.8125rem;
      line-height: 0.8125rem;
      font-weight: 600;
      padding: 1em 0;
      }

      #nytslm .nytslm_li a {
      color: #121212;
      text-decoration: none;
      }

      #nytslm .nytsmenu_li_current,
      #nytslm .nytslm_li a:hover,
      #nytslm .nytslm_li a:active,
      #nytslm .nytslm_li a:focus {
      color: #121212;
      border-bottom: 2px solid #121212;
      padding-bottom: 2px;
      }

      .nytslm_li_live_loud:after {
      content: ‘LIVE’
      }

      .nytslm_li_live_loud {
      background-color: #d0021b;
      color: white;
      border-radius: 3px;
      padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
      margin-right: 2px;
      display: inline-block;
      letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
      font-weight: 700;
      }

      .nytslm_li_upcoming_loud {
      border: 1px solid #d0021b;
      color: #d0021b;
      border-radius: 3px;
      padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
      margin-right: 2px;
      display: inline-block;
      letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
      font-weight: 700;
      }

      .nytslm_li_upcoming_loud:before {
      content: ‘Upcoming’
      }

      .nytslm_li_loud a:hover,
      .nytslm_li_loud a:active,
      .nytslm_li_loud a:focus {
      border-bottom: 2px solid;
      padding-bottom: 2px;
      }

      .nytslm_li_updated {
      color: #777;
      }

      #masthead-bar-one {
      display: none;
      }

      .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
      width: 80px;
      align-self: center;
      display: flex;
      }

      @media(min-width: 600px) {
      .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
      width: 100px;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_notification {
      border-left: 1px solid #ccc;
      font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
      padding-left: 1em;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_label {
      color: #D0021B;
      text-transform: uppercase;
      font-weight: 700;
      font-size: 0.6875rem;
      margin-bottom: 0.2em;
      letter-spacing: 0.02em;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_link {
      font-weight: 600;
      color: #121212;
      display: flex;
      align-items: center;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_headline {
      font-size: 0.875rem;
      line-height: 1.0625rem;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image_wrapper {
      position: relative;
      max-width: 75px;
      margin-left: 10px;
      flex-shrink: 0;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image {
      max-width: 100%;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image_live_bug {
      position: absolute;
      text-transform: uppercase;
      bottom: 7px;
      left: 2px;

      font-size: 0.5rem;
      background-color: #d0021b;
      color: white;
      border-radius: 3px;
      padding: 4px 4px 2px 4px;
      font-weight: 700;
      margin-right: 2px;
      letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
      }

      /* No hover state on in app */
      .Hybrid .nytslm_li a:hover,
      .Hybrid .nytslm_li_loud a:hover {
      border-bottom: none;
      padding-bottom: 0;
      }

      .Hybrid #TOP_BANNER_REGION {
      display: none;
      }

      .nytslm_st0 {
      fill: #f4564a;
      }

      .nytslm_st1 {
      fill: #ffffff;
      }

      .nytslm_st2 {
      fill: #2b8ad8;
      }

      Electoral College Results

      Election Disinformation

      Full Results

      Biden Transition Updates

      “),e+=””+b+””,e+=””,d&&(e+=””,e+=””,e+=”Live”,e+=””),e+=””,e}function getVariant(){var a=window.NYTD&&window.NYTD.Abra&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync(“STYLN_elections_notifications”);// Only actually have control situation in prd and stg
      return[“www.nytimes.com”,”www.stg.nytimes.com”].includes(window.location.hostname)||(a=”STYLN_elections_notifications”),a||”0_control”}function reportData(){if(window.dataLayer){var a;try{a=dataLayer.find(function(a){return!!a.user}).user}catch(a){}var b={abtest:{test:”styln-elections-notifications”,variant:getVariant()},module:{name:”styln-elections-notifications”,label:getVariant(),region:”TOP_BANNER”},user:a};window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-alloc”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-expose”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”impression”}))}}function insertNotification(a,b){// Bail here if the user is in control
      if(reportData(),”0_control”!==getVariant()){// Remove menu bar items or previous notification
      var c=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_innerContainer”);if(c&&1 30 * 60 * 1000) return restoreMenuIfNecessary();
      // Do not update DOM if the content won’t change
      if(currentNotificationContents!==a.text&&window.localStorage.getItem(“stylnelecs”)!==a.timestamp)// Do not show if user has interacted with this link
      // if (Cookie.get(‘stylnelecs’) === data.timestamp) return;
      {expireLocalStorage(“stylnelecs”),currentNotificationContents=a.text;// Construct URL for tracking
      var b=a.link.split(“#”),c=b[0]+”?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-notifications&variant=1_election_notifications&region=TOP_BANNER&context=Menu#”+b[1],d=formatNotification(c,a.text,a.kicker,a.image);insertNotification(d,function(){var b=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_notification_link”);return b?void(b.onclick=function(){window.localStorage.setItem(“stylnelecs”,a.timestamp)}):null})}})}(function(){navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)||window.stylnelecsHasLoaded||(// setInterval(getUpdate, 5000);
      window.stylnelecsHasLoaded=!0)})(),function(){try{if(navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)){var a=document.getElementsByClassName(“nytslm_title”)[0];a.style.pointerEvents=”none”}}catch(a){}}(); More

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      @media (pointer: coarse) {
      .nytslm_outerContainer {
      overflow-x: scroll;
      -webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_outerContainer {
      display: flex;
      align-items: center;
      /* Fixes IE */
      overflow-x: auto;
      box-shadow: -6px 0 white, 6px 0 white, 1px 3px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.15);
      padding: 10px 1.25em 10px;
      transition: all 250ms;
      -ms-overflow-style: none;
      /* IE 10+ */
      scrollbar-width: none;
      /* Firefox */
      background: white;
      margin-bottom: 20px;
      z-index: 1000;
      }

      @media (min-width: 1024px) {
      .nytslm_outerContainer {
      margin-bottom: 0px;
      padding: 13px 1.25em 10px;
      }
      }

      .nytslm::-webkit-scrollbar {
      display: none;
      /* Safari and Chrome */
      }

      .nytslm_innerContainer {
      margin: unset;
      display: flex;
      align-items: center;
      }

      @media (min-width: 600px) {
      .nytslm_innerContainer {
      margin: auto;
      min-width: 600px;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_title {
      padding-right: 1em;
      border-right: 1px solid #ccc;
      }

      @media (min-width: 740px) {
      .nytslm_title {
      max-width: none;
      font-size: 1.0625rem;
      line-height: 1.25rem;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_spacer {
      width: 0;
      border-right: 1px solid #E2E2E2;
      height: 45px;
      margin: 0 1.4em;
      }

      .nytslm_list {
      font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
      display: flex;
      width: auto;
      list-style: none;
      padding-left: 1em;
      flex-shrink: 0;
      align-items: baseline;
      justify-content: center;
      }

      .nytslm_li {
      margin-right: 1.4em;
      flex-shrink: 0;
      font-size: 0.8125rem;
      line-height: 0.8125rem;
      font-weight: 600;
      padding: 1em 0;
      }

      #nytslm .nytslm_li a {
      color: #121212;
      text-decoration: none;
      }

      #nytslm .nytsmenu_li_current,
      #nytslm .nytslm_li a:hover,
      #nytslm .nytslm_li a:active,
      #nytslm .nytslm_li a:focus {
      color: #121212;
      border-bottom: 2px solid #121212;
      padding-bottom: 2px;
      }

      .nytslm_li_live_loud:after {
      content: ‘LIVE’
      }

      .nytslm_li_live_loud {
      background-color: #d0021b;
      color: white;
      border-radius: 3px;
      padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
      margin-right: 2px;
      display: inline-block;
      letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
      font-weight: 700;
      }

      .nytslm_li_upcoming_loud {
      border: 1px solid #d0021b;
      color: #d0021b;
      border-radius: 3px;
      padding: 4px 6px 2px 6px;
      margin-right: 2px;
      display: inline-block;
      letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
      font-weight: 700;
      }

      .nytslm_li_upcoming_loud:before {
      content: ‘Upcoming’
      }

      .nytslm_li_loud a:hover,
      .nytslm_li_loud a:active,
      .nytslm_li_loud a:focus {
      border-bottom: 2px solid;
      padding-bottom: 2px;
      }

      .nytslm_li_updated {
      color: #777;
      }

      #masthead-bar-one {
      display: none;
      }

      .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
      width: 80px;
      align-self: center;
      display: flex;
      }

      @media(min-width: 600px) {
      .electionNavbar__logoSvg {
      width: 100px;
      }
      }

      .nytslm_notification {
      border-left: 1px solid #ccc;
      font-family: nyt-franklin, helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
      padding-left: 1em;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_label {
      color: #D0021B;
      text-transform: uppercase;
      font-weight: 700;
      font-size: 0.6875rem;
      margin-bottom: 0.2em;
      letter-spacing: 0.02em;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_link {
      font-weight: 600;
      color: #121212;
      display: flex;
      align-items: center;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_headline {
      font-size: 0.875rem;
      line-height: 1.0625rem;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image_wrapper {
      position: relative;
      max-width: 75px;
      margin-left: 10px;
      flex-shrink: 0;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image {
      max-width: 100%;
      }

      .nytslm_notification_image_live_bug {
      position: absolute;
      text-transform: uppercase;
      bottom: 7px;
      left: 2px;

      font-size: 0.5rem;
      background-color: #d0021b;
      color: white;
      border-radius: 3px;
      padding: 4px 4px 2px 4px;
      font-weight: 700;
      margin-right: 2px;
      letter-spacing: 0.03rem;
      }

      /* No hover state on in app */
      .Hybrid .nytslm_li a:hover,
      .Hybrid .nytslm_li_loud a:hover {
      border-bottom: none;
      padding-bottom: 0;
      }

      .Hybrid #TOP_BANNER_REGION {
      display: none;
      }

      .nytslm_st0 {
      fill: #f4564a;
      }

      .nytslm_st1 {
      fill: #ffffff;
      }

      .nytslm_st2 {
      fill: #2b8ad8;
      }

      Electoral College Results

      Election Disinformation

      Full Results

      Biden Transition Updates

      “),e+=””+b+””,e+=””,d&&(e+=””,e+=””,e+=”Live”,e+=””),e+=””,e}function getVariant(){var a=window.NYTD&&window.NYTD.Abra&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync&&window.NYTD.Abra.getAbraSync(“STYLN_elections_notifications”);// Only actually have control situation in prd and stg
      return[“www.nytimes.com”,”www.stg.nytimes.com”].includes(window.location.hostname)||(a=”STYLN_elections_notifications”),a||”0_control”}function reportData(){if(window.dataLayer){var a;try{a=dataLayer.find(function(a){return!!a.user}).user}catch(a){}var b={abtest:{test:”styln-elections-notifications”,variant:getVariant()},module:{name:”styln-elections-notifications”,label:getVariant(),region:”TOP_BANNER”},user:a};window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-alloc”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”ab-expose”})),window.dataLayer.push(Object.assign({},b,{event:”impression”}))}}function insertNotification(a,b){// Bail here if the user is in control
      if(reportData(),”0_control”!==getVariant()){// Remove menu bar items or previous notification
      var c=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_innerContainer”);if(c&&1 30 * 60 * 1000) return restoreMenuIfNecessary();
      // Do not update DOM if the content won’t change
      if(currentNotificationContents!==a.text&&window.localStorage.getItem(“stylnelecs”)!==a.timestamp)// Do not show if user has interacted with this link
      // if (Cookie.get(‘stylnelecs’) === data.timestamp) return;
      {expireLocalStorage(“stylnelecs”),currentNotificationContents=a.text;// Construct URL for tracking
      var b=a.link.split(“#”),c=b[0]+”?action=click&pgtype=Article&state=default&module=styln-elections-notifications&variant=1_election_notifications&region=TOP_BANNER&context=Menu#”+b[1],d=formatNotification(c,a.text,a.kicker,a.image);insertNotification(d,function(){var b=document.querySelector(“.nytslm_notification_link”);return b?void(b.onclick=function(){window.localStorage.setItem(“stylnelecs”,a.timestamp)}):null})}})}(function(){navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)||window.stylnelecsHasLoaded||(// setInterval(getUpdate, 5000);
      window.stylnelecsHasLoaded=!0)})(),function(){try{if(navigator.userAgent.includes(“nytios”)||navigator.userAgent.includes(“nyt_android”)){var a=document.getElementsByClassName(“nytslm_title”)[0];a.style.pointerEvents=”none”}}catch(a){}}(); More