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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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      Eric Adams Files Lawsuit Preserving His Right to Challenge Election Results

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      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.” More

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      The N.Y.C. Elections Board Is a Disaster. This Is the Last Straw.

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      New Yorkers have endured the incompetence of the city’s Board of Elections for so long that complaints on the subject blend into the background noise of life in a megalopolis, alongside gripes about overstuffed subway cars and putrid piles of sidewalk trash.This page called the board “at best a semi‐functioning anachronism” — and that was 50 years ago.Nary an election passes without another reminder of how much contempt the agency has for the city’s vast, diverse electorate. Accidentally purged voter rolls, misaddressed absentee ballots, intolerably long lines. The catalog of dysfunction and neglect seems endless.Yet somehow the board found a new way to humiliate itself and the city, one week after 800,000 New Yorkers went to the polls to cast ballots in the most consequential mayoral primaries in a generation. Or was it 940,000 New Yorkers? Good question. For several bewildering hours on Tuesday, no one had an answer.The first number, which the board reported shortly after polls closed on June 22, reflected the first-place votes cast in person during early voting and on Election Day, and showed Eric Adams with a commanding lead in the Democratic primary. The second number included the full ranked-choice tallies of those same ballots and, to the shock of the political establishment, appeared to show Kathryn Garcia vaulting from third place into a near tie with Mr. Adams. But political observers across the city soon flagged the vote-total discrepancy. So did Mr. Adams, who rightly demanded an explanation for the “irregularities.”By late afternoon, the board had removed the new results from its website. A few hours later, the explanation came out, and it was a doozy, even by the board’s degraded standards: 135,000 “votes” included in Tuesday’s tally were in fact not real votes, but part of a test run that the board had failed to clear from a computer before posting the numbers to the public.In a tweet, the board pleaded with the public and the candidates for patience. No, patience is something you earn through transparency and competence, two qualities the New York City elections board does not possess. A particularly toxic, century-old vestige of the city’s patronage system, it is run by friends and relatives of political power brokers from both parties, who seem to care for nothing as much as their own incumbency. The board’s 10 commissioners, one Democrat and one Republican from each borough, get their paychecks despite not being trained in election administration — or, it appears, any other civic-minded pursuit.The board’s commissioners fight sensible efforts to make voting more accessible and reject money — most recently, $20 million from Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2016 — that could help make the operation more competent.City investigations have for decades documented the board’s tribulations in depressingly repetitive language: “inefficiency, laxity and waste”; “illegalities, misconduct, and antiquated operations.” The board’s own staff — who try to do their job with professionalism and honesty — have called it “chronically dysfunctional” and an “insane asylum.”Last fall, as the country geared up for a presidential election amid a pandemic, the city’s comptroller, Scott Stringer, who is now on the mayoral ballot, said of the board, “We shouldn’t have to hold our breath because of their gross incompetence.” Still the board manages to take our breath away.This latest blunder comes at an especially bad time, in the middle of the city’s first mayoral election to use ranked-choice voting, a smart electoral innovation that many other cities have adopted without major trouble.Some have jumped to blame the new voting method for Tuesday’s mess, but the real culprit is the same old one: a decrepit, self-dealing political machine that refuses to release its stranglehold on the city’s elections.The fiasco is all the worse given the fragile state of American democracy in the wake of the Trump presidency. The need for public confidence in election procedures has never been higher. A functioning board would have eased voters’ concerns about the new system; this one exacerbated them, and the damage could take years to repair.Last fall, after the board sent out mislabeled and misaddressed ballots, Donald Trump tweeted, “Big Fraud, Unfixable!” He was partly right. The board can’t be fixed; it can only be dismantled and rebuilt as the professional, nonpartisan agency that New Yorkers deserve.This means amending the state Constitution, which should happen as soon as possible. Lawmakers in search of a new model can take a cue from Los Angeles, where elections are run by trained officials who seemingly care about getting things right and serving the citizens who pay their salaries.If this latest disaster is to have any silver lining, it will be as the catalyst for a comprehensive reform that should have happened decades ago.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      How Andrew Yang Went from Front-Runner to Fourth Place

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      For months, Andrew Yang seemed like he was exactly what New York City was looking for in a mayor.He was relentlessly positive at a time when the city, still locked down during the pandemic, was somber. While other candidates were stuck in a loop of online mayoral forums, he seized attention by holding in-person events, capitalizing on his star power as a 2020 presidential candidate.He leapt to the top of polls, drawing the affection of wealthy donors and envy from the race’s more established candidates. But as the race’s sudden front-runner, Mr. Yang began to draw more scrutiny from the news media and his rivals, and bit by bit, he lost ground.Eric Adams was the first to pass him, and others would follow. By primary night, Mr. Yang was the first candidate to concede, far back in fourth place.His collapse was a result of an accumulation of factors: self-inflicted wounds, a perception that he was out of his depth, and the city’s changing environment.The pall that had fallen over New York had started to lift: Mr. Yang had campaigned on reopening the city, but the city had reopened without him. And now New Yorkers seemed far more worried about crime, an ideal scenario for Mr. Adams, a former police captain and the current Brooklyn borough president.Mr. Yang tried to change his message and tone, but the shift was too late and seemed to alienate some of his core followers.In the early stages of the mayoral campaign, Mr. Yang held far more in-person events than his rivals.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesIn interviews with campaign staffers and surrogates, supporters and opponents, the diagnoses of Mr. Yang’s electoral maladies span the spectrum: He fumbled once it became clear that celebrity alone could not carry the day; he did not try hard enough to reach Black and Latino voters. His campaign was too media-driven, yet he never fully relinquished his Twitter account to more responsible hands. He failed to master the city’s intricacies, and did not turn on-the-ground energy into votes.“When you’re out in the streets and in the communities, and people are literally shouting at him, ‘I’m going to vote for you,’ what’s the step two?” asked Grace Meng, a congresswoman from Queens who endorsed Mr. Yang. “Step-one level of excitement isn’t enough.”In the initial stages of his campaign, it seemed like Mr. Yang was everywhere. While the rest of the field held virtual forums and fund-raisers, he was on the streets, touring Flushing, Queens, and Brownsville in Brooklyn, and visiting Hwa Yuan, a 54-year-old Chinatown restaurant struggling to survive the pandemic. He sat for interviews with Wolf Blitzer and “The View,” and won big-name endorsements from Representative Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, and Martin Luther King III.Mr. Yang, who declined to be interviewed for this article, vowed to deliver $2,000 a year in guaranteed cash to the city’s 500,000 poorest New Yorkers. It was far from the universal basic income plan that drove his presidential campaign, and he never clearly explained how he would pay for it, but it still forced some of his rivals to respond with cash relief plans of their own.At campaign events like the reopening of Coney Island, Mr. Yang was relentlessly positive.James Estrin/The New York TimesHe had to quarantine when a campaign staffer got Covid, and then isolate again when he got it himself. He suffered through a kidney stone. But little seemed like it could stop him, not even a series of gaffes.He suggested that New York should put a casino on Governors Island, a green respite in the harbor where casinos are illegal. He released a video of a local “bodega” that seemed to suggest to social media critics that he did not know what a bodega was. He incited the left when he suggested he would crack down on street vendors — many of them undocumented workers with few other options at their disposal.Mr. Yang, 46, also withstood ridicule after telling The New York Times how he spent much of the pandemic in his second home upstate. He noted the challenges of fulfilling his obligations as a CNN commentator from his apartment in Manhattan, explaining, “Can you imagine trying to have two kids on virtual school in a two-bedroom apartment, and then trying to do work yourself?” Many New Yorkers had no trouble imagining that at all.“I think we took a lot of cannons for a long time, some of it justifiable,” said Chris Coffey, one of Mr. Yang’s two campaign managers, who was speaking by phone from Governors Island, where the Yang campaign was having a postelection picnic whose location was intentionally ironic (and where there were in fact cannons). “It’s hard to know what causes the ship to eventually take on water. I still think most of it is the race just changed.”Mr. Yang’s nonstop campaign schedule did come to a halt when he had to isolate after testing positive for Covid-19. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesTwo weeks in particular stood out to campaign supporters as the turning point in Mr. Yang’s fortunes. On May 10, Mr. Yang sent out a tweet that was drafted by a Jewish adviser, and vetted by Mr. Coffey. At the time, the Israeli army and Hamas were exchanging fire, a dramatic ratcheting up of tensions that killed civilians on both sides, but particularly Palestinians.“I’m standing with the people of Israel who are coming under bombardment attacks, and condemn the Hamas terrorists,” Mr. Yang said. “The people of NYC will always stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel who face down terrorism and persevere.”Nothing about the tweet was out of step with how New York politicians typically talk about Israel. The city is home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and Mr. Adams had made a similar statement. But Mr. Yang has nearly two million Twitter followers, and his tweet drew attention from all sides.Mr. Yang received unwanted praise from Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser, and unwanted condemnation from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who said that Mr. Yang’s remarks, followed by his plan to attend a Muslim event in Queens, were “utterly shameful.”The episode led the campaign to tighten its process for reviewing urgent policy tweets, Mr. Coffey said, requiring that all of them get approval from both him and Sasha Neha Ahuja, Mr. Yang’s other campaign manager.On May 19, Mr. Yang demonstrated ignorance about the debt load of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, whose subway and bus system he had proposed to take over from the state. The next day, he failed to understand a question about a controversial law that protected police disciplinary records; hours earlier, he had proposed creating homeless shelters for victims of domestic violence, even though New York City has operated such shelters for years.In the race’s last stages, Mr. Yang campaigned alongside Kathryn Garcia, and encouraged his followers to rank her second.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesIn retrospect, rival campaign aides said that Mr. Yang erred from the beginning by not expressing more humility and a hunger to learn the New York City political ropes from those who know them.Peter Brown, the chief strategist for Kathryn Garcia’s campaign, said he disagreed with the Yang campaign’s decision to release internal polling that at times conjured a sense of the near-inevitability of victory. Instead, Mr. Brown suggested that it would have been wiser to release a memo minimizing expectations, portraying Mr. Yang as an overachieving underdog who was going to have to work hard.Micah Lasher, the campaign manager for the city comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, made a similar point, and harkened back to Hillary Clinton’s run for the Senate.“Hillary Clinton came in 2000 and demonstrated a surprising humility and interest in learning, and there was a version of that that Yang could have done,” Mr. Lasher said. “Instead, they did the opposite: ‘We’re here, we are big, we are going to win.’ That was the beginning and end of their game plan.”By the end of the campaign, Mr. Yang’s camp had shifted yet again — the preternaturally upbeat Mr. Yang turned negative.Mr. Yang used a recent spate of anti-Asian attacks to push for more public safety measures, including getting people with untreated mental illness off the streets.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesAfter he spent months publicly asking Ms. Garcia to serve as his deputy in City Hall, her poll numbers rose and he started attacking her record as sanitation commissioner. He routinely suggested Mr. Adams lacked a moral compass. And he futilely tried to outflank Mr. Adams on crime.“Yes, mentally ill people have rights, but you know who else have rights? We do: the people and families of the city,” Mr. Yang said at the final debate. “We have the right to walk the street and not fear for our safety because a mentally ill person is going to lash out at us.”Mr. Yang was speaking from some personal experience. As an Asian American man, he was a member of a community that had been victim to a spike in hate crimes, some of them committed by New Yorkers with histories of mental illness. Polls had found that economic recovery and moving beyond Covid were no longer top of mind for voters, and Mr. Yang was diverging from his original message.“Our core issues faded not just from first to second, but to third,” said Eric Soufer, a senior adviser to the Yang campaign. “You can’t keep running a campaign based on the same thing, when the fundamentals change like that.”But some campaign staff members acknowledged that they became disillusioned by some of Mr. Yang’s shift in positions, and how they did not comport with the man who promised to be the anti-poverty mayor, who vowed to institute guaranteed income for poor New Yorkers and help establish a public bank.As the primary night results were released, Mr. Yang became the first mayoral candidate to concede.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times“At the end, there wasn’t a clear, cogent argument of what he stood for that resonated,” said Ron Kim, a Queens assemblyman who endorsed Mr. Yang. “If I could go back, I would have encouraged him to stick with what he was known for, which was being an innovator, a person who can deliver out-of-the-box thinking on solutions for economic growth and jobs.”In the race’s last stages, Mr. Yang threw his support to Ms. Garcia, encouraging his supporters to rank her second. Though they campaigned together, she did not ask the same of her supporters; she said she had hoped to piggyback on Mr. Yang’s popularity in certain sectors of the city.Mr. Yang did perform well with heavily Asian communities in Queens like Elmhurst and Flushing, as well as in heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn, like Borough Park. He did not do nearly as well in Manhattan, his home borough, where he garnered 10 percent of the in-person vote; Ms. Garcia captured the most votes in that borough.“There were some tensions within the team where people would say, ‘Well, you can’t out-cop the cop,’” Mr. Yang said in an episode of his podcast that aired Monday.“For me,” he added, “both common sense and the numbers indicated that crime was going to be the number one issue.”And despite being the self-described ideas candidate, Mr. Yang did not have enough of them to entice voters.“As the person who was getting most of the attention, the race became a referendum on him,” said Stu Loeser, who advised the campaign of Ray McGuire, the former Citigroup executive. “And he proved himself to be a callow, unsubstantial, often dimwitted person.” More

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      New York Mayor’s Race in Chaos After Elections Board Pulls Back Results

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      The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched Democratic primary contest into a new period of uncertainty.The New York City mayor’s race plunged into chaos on Tuesday night when the city Board of Elections released a new tally of votes in the Democratic mayoral primary, and then removed the tabulations from its website after citing a “discrepancy.”The results released earlier in the day had suggested that the race between Eric Adams and his two closest rivals had tightened significantly.But just a few hours after releasing the preliminary results, the elections board issued a cryptic tweet revealing a “discrepancy” in the report, saying that it was working with its “technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred.”By Tuesday evening, the tabulations had been taken down, replaced by a new advisory that the ranked-choice results would be available “starting on June 30.”Then, around 10:30 p.m., the board finally released a statement, explaining that it had failed to remove sample ballot images used to test its ranked-choice voting software. When the board ran the program, it counted “both test and election night results, producing approximately 135,000 additional records,” the statement said. The ranked-choice numbers, it said, would be tabulated again.The extraordinary sequence of events seeded further confusion about the outcome, and threw the closely watched contest into a new period of uncertainty at a consequential moment for the city.For the Board of Elections, which has long been plagued by dysfunction and nepotism, this was its first try at implementing ranked-choice voting on a citywide scale, and skeptics had expressed doubts about the board’s ability to pull off the process despite its successful use in other cities.Under ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner.The Board of Elections released preliminary, unofficial ranked-choice tabulations on Tuesday afternoon, showing that Mr. Adams — who had held a significant advantage on primary night — was narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia in the ballots cast in person during early voting or on Primary Day. Maya D. Wiley, who came in second place in the initial vote count, was close behind in third place.A few hours later, the board disclosed its unspecified discrepancy, and it was not at all clear Tuesday night how accurate the most recent tally was, or if it was accurate at all.The results may well be scrambled again: Even after the Board of Elections sorts through the preliminary tally, it must count around 124,000 Democratic absentee ballots. Once they are tabulated, the board will take the new total that includes them and run a new set of ranked-choice elimination rounds, with a final result not expected until mid-July.New York Primary Election ResultsSee full results and maps from the New York City mayoral race and other primaries.Some Democrats, bracing for an acrimonious new chapter in the race, are concerned that the incremental release of results by the Board of Elections — and the discovery of a possible error — may stir distrust of ranked-choice voting and sow divisions along racial and class lines when the outcome is ultimately announced.In a tweet on Tuesday evening, Mr. Adams sought to project assuredness.“Earlier today, the Board of Elections released a ranked choice voting simulation based on last week’s election results that they have since acknowledged include ‘discrepancies,’” Mr. Adams wrote. “We are waiting for an explanation and still confident in our lead.”If elected, Mr. Adams would be the city’s second Black mayor, after David N. Dinkins. Some of Mr. Adams’s supporters have already cast the ranked-choice process as an attempt to disenfranchise voters of color, an argument that intensified among some backers on Tuesday afternoon as the race had appeared to tighten, and is virtually certain to escalate should he lose his primary night lead to Ms. Garcia, who is white.Surrogates for Mr. Adams have suggested without evidence that an apparent ranked-choice alliance between Ms. Garcia and another rival, Andrew Yang, could amount to an attempt to suppress the votes of Black and Latino New Yorkers; Mr. Adams himself claimed that the alliance was aimed at preventing a “person of color” from winning the race.In the final days of the race, Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang campaigned together across the city, especially in neighborhoods that are home to sizable Asian American communities, and appeared together on campaign literature.To advocates of ranked-choice voting, the round-by-round shuffling of outcomes is part of the process of electing a candidate with broad appeal. Mr. Adams has said that he would accept the results of the election, even as he and his allies have long been critical of ranked-choice voting.But if Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley were to prevail, the process — which was approved by voters in a 2019 ballot measure — would likely attract fresh scrutiny, with some of Mr. Adams’s backers and others already urging a new referendum on it. By Tuesday night, though, it was the Board of Elections that was attracting ire from seemingly all corners.Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s former public advocate who now runs Citizens Union, a good-government group, said “the entire country is watching” the Board of Elections. “New Yorkers deserve elections, and election administrators, that they can have the utmost faith in,” Ms. Gotbaum added.Kathryn Garcia, one of Mr. Adams’s chief rivals, said it was important to ensure “that New York City’s voices are heard.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesWhile it is difficult, it is not unheard-of for a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election to eventually win the race through later rounds of voting — that happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010, and nearly occurred in San Francisco in 2018.The winner of New York’s Democratic primary, who is almost certain to become the city’s next mayor, will face Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, who won the Republican primary.According to the now-withdrawn tabulation released Tuesday, Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, nearly made it to the final round. She finished closely behind Ms. Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, before being eliminated in the penultimate round of the preliminary exercise.After the count of in-person ballots last week, Ms. Garcia had trailed Ms. Wiley by about 2.6 percentage points. Asked if she had been in touch with Ms. Wiley’s team, Ms. Garcia suggested there had been staff-level conversations.“The campaigns have been speaking to each other,” Ms. Garcia said in a phone call on Tuesday afternoon, saying the two candidates had not yet spoken directly. “Hopefully we don’t have to step in with attorneys. But it is about really ensuring that New York City’s voices are heard.”Maya Wiley, another top contender, renewed her call to “count every vote.”Hilary Swift for The New York TimesMs. Wiley ran well to the left of Ms. Garcia on a number of vital policy matters, including around policing and on some education questions. Either candidate would be the first woman elected mayor of New York, and Ms. Wiley would be the city’s first Black female mayor.“I said on election night, we must allow the democratic process to continue and count every vote so that New Yorkers have faith in our democracy and government,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement on Tuesday. “And we must all support its results.”Mr. Adams, a former police captain and a relative moderate on several key issues, was a non-starter for many progressive voters who may have preferred Ms. Garcia and her focus on competence over any especially ideological message.But early results suggested that Mr. Adams had significant strength among working-class voters of color, and some traction among white voters with moderate views.City Councilman I. Daneek Miller, an Adams supporter who is pressing for a new referendum on ranked-choice voting, suggested in a text message on Tuesday that the system had opened the door to “an attempt to eliminate the candidate of moderate working people and traditionally marginalized communities,” as he implicitly criticized the Yang-Garcia alliance.“It is incumbent on us now to address the issue of ranked voting and how it is being weaponized against a wide portion of the public,” said Mr. Miller, the co-chair of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus on the City Council.Other close observers of the election separately expressed discomfort with the decision to release a ranked-choice tally without accounting for absentee ballots.“There is real danger that voters will come to believe a set of facts about the race that will be disproven when all votes are in,” said Ben Greenfield, a senior survey data analyst at Change Research, which conducted polling for a pro-Garcia PAC. “The risk is that this could take a system that’s already new and confusing and increase people’s sense of mistrust.”Dana Rubinstein, Jeffery C. Mays, Anne Barnard, Andy Newman and Mihir Zaveri contributed reporting. 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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      Time to Get Some Ranked-Choice Voting Results

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Sunny early, then cloudier in the afternoon, with scattered thunderstorms. High in the mid-90s, but because of the humidity it will seem like 100 or more. Alternate-side parking: In effect until Sunday (Independence Day). Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesPrimary Day may have been one week ago. But many races across the city — including the Democratic primary for mayor — are not finished because of ranked-choice voting. Today, elections officials are expected to reveal the first, preliminary round of ranked-choice results, bringing New Yorkers one step closer to knowing who is most likely to become mayor, among other races.[Eric Adams received the most first-choice in-person votes last week. It is difficult, but mathematically possible, for two other candidates to catch up to him.]What happens today?Elections officials will run through the ranked-choice ballots for all votes cast in person on Primary Day and during early voting, offering a fuller (but incomplete) picture of how votes are adding up.A process of elimination will take place that works like this: The candidate with the fewest 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 is then eliminated, with the votes reallocated to each voter’s next choice, and so on, until two candidates remain. The candidate with the most votes would be the winner.In the Democratic race for mayor, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.4 percentage points after first-choice votes were counted. Mr. Adams was ahead of Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner, by about 12 points.After running through the ranked-choice votes, those numbers might change.What happens next?The results to be announced on Tuesday won’t be final, in part because tens of thousands of absentee ballots will not be included.The results will show only who would win if there were no absentee ballots. Later, after absentee ballots have been counted, elections officials will run a new set of elimination rounds for the final result, which may take at least two more weeks.As of Monday, there were around 124,000 outstanding Democratic absentee ballots that had not been counted, and more might trickle in before the deadline today.From The TimesLawmakers Sue N.Y.P.D., Saying They Were Beaten With Bicycles at ProtestPolice Officers Will ‘Flood’ Times Square After Another Bystander Is ShotTrump’s Lawyers Make Late Bid to Fend Off Charges Against His BusinessNew York and New Jersey Need an $11B Tunnel. Will Biden Make It Happen?Liquor Laws Once Targeted Gay Bars. Now, One State Is Apologizing.Want more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingIn last week’s citywide primary election, voter turnout fell in some areas that were hard-hit by Covid-19. [The City]Several people were arrested when police officers clashed with people celebrating Pride in Washington Square Park. [Gothamist]A police officer was injured after being shot with a BB gun on Staten Island, officials said. [N.Y. Post]And finally: A vibrant Pride weekend The Times’s Julia Carmel writes:New York’s Pride celebrations and protests came back with a vengeance over the weekend, after a muted celebration last year because of the pandemic.Tens of thousands of people took over the streets of Greenwich Village on Sunday, starting impromptu dance parties and embracing the freedom of being together again.Ahlasia Hunter, 23, who was attending her first Pride, danced and cheered from atop a traffic barricade on Sunday afternoon.“Bro, the energy is amazing,” Ms. Hunter said. “If you don’t have a bucket list, you need to start a bucket list — you’ve got to come to Pride.”Last year, as people were encouraged to stay home because of the pandemic, the Pride March, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary, was reduced to a procession of several dozen people with no in-person audience.Though the final weekend of June usually boasts hundreds of Pride events and draws millions of visitors to New York, the largest Pride event in 2020 was the second annual Queer Liberation March — an event that has drawn support for being an anti-police and anti-corporate alternative to more commercial gatherings.Pride also arrived last year during the Black Lives Matter marches and demonstrations that followed the murder of George Floyd. The groundswell prompted popular events like the Dyke March to redirect supporters to Black-led marches and rallies.This year, though the Pride March was virtual once again, thousands of people streamed down Fifth Avenue on Saturday for the Dyke March, while the Queer Liberation March, held for the third time, brought thousands more to the streets on Sunday afternoon.“I’ve been stuck inside for the past year,” said Amaris Cook, 19, who traveled from Springfield, Mass., to attend the Queer Liberation March. “It’s just great to be out again and see other people.”It’s Tuesday — dance in the streets.Metropolitan Diary: Spare tissue Dear Diary:My wife and I were on an escalator at the Port Authority Terminal, on our way home from the theater. I asked my wife, who was two steps ahead of me, if she had a tissue.She said yes and that she would give me one when we reached the top.Suddenly, a hand holding a small pack of tissues reached over my shoulder. I turned to see a woman standing behind me with a smile on her face.“Here you go,” she said, “and keep the package.”— Stuart SchwartzNew 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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      The Mike Pence Saga Tells Us More Than We Want to Know

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      Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. I was hoping to pick up where we left off last week, with the New York City mayoral primary and our new ranked-choice voting system. Assuming Eric Adams holds on to his lead, what do you think his win says about the state of the city — and of the Democratic Party?Gail Collins: Bret, this is why I love conversing with you. I’ve been hearing Republicans howl about the negotiations with Joe Biden on spending, and I was dreading a discussion on that subject.Bret: Biden gets out a little over his skis with a dumb remark, publicly admits he screwed up, pledges to keep his word on a bipartisan bill. Imagine that.Gail: Well, the city election is definitely a more interesting topic and I can see why Eric Adams intrigues you. He’s a Black former police officer who ran on his crime-fighting skills. Politically he’s a moderate — by New York standards, anyway. And talking with his supporters after the vote, I did get the impression that some were most concerned with blocking off Maya Wiley, the only real leftie with a chance of winning.Of course while the left was getting bad news in New York City, regular Buffalo Democrats were discovering their longtime mayor had lost the primary to a Black female socialist. Hoping to hear a lot more discussion about India Walton as we slowly make our way through this political year.Nothing is for sure yet in the city — thanks to our new preferential voting system New Yorkers may not get the final word on who won the primary for ages. But if it’s Adams, it could send a cheerful message to people like Chuck Schumer, who’s up for re-election next year. There’s been speculation about whether Schumer might be challenged by a progressive.Bret: New system or not, I still don’t understand why it should take forever to know the results of a municipal election. But I’ll be happy if Adams holds on to his lead, for lots of reasons.One good reason to cheer an Adams victory is that it would demonstrate yet again that the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left doesn’t represent the Democratic base. “Defund the police” is not a working-class interest.Gail: Yeah, but having unarmed, trained mediators who could respond to complaints like family fighting might get a good response.Bret: I used to think that was a good idea. Then several of our readers explained to me that family altercations are often violent and require more than a social worker.Getting back to working-class interests: Blocking Amazon and the thousands of jobs it would have brought to Queens was not pro-worker. Nor does it help the working class to deny parents who can’t afford to send their kids to Dalton the school choice they need, when it comes to getting a better education for their children.Gail: The public school issue is so important and so complicated. You want to make sure it’s always open to reform and improvement. Still, you don’t want to create a system that allows canny parents to get terrific options for their own kids while reducing public pressure for all-around quality education.But go on.Bret: My bottom line is that “democratic socialism” might be cool with pampered N.Y.U. undergrads, but it isn’t going to help people who aren’t partying in Washington Square Park. So hooray for Adams and all middle-of-the-road Democrats. In the meantime, our mutual friend Donald Trump is on the rally circuit again.Gail: Wow, I watched his speech over the weekend. I guess it was a sort of return to national politics — Trump’s been off the trail since January when his attempt to convince the world he didn’t lose the election led to a bloody riot.No violence this time. In fact, the whole thing was one big snooze.Hard to imagine him really making a comeback. But also hard to imagine who’d be coming next. Can’t really picture a President Pence.Bret: You know, I probably spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than I ought to, given my high blood pressure. He reminds me of Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergyman in “Pride and Prejudice,” who’s always bowing and scraping to the overbearing, tasteless, talentless Lady Catherine de Bourgh, while he also lords it over the Bennet family because he stands to inherit their estate. Alternatively, Pence could be a character out of Dickens, with some ridiculous name like Wackford Squeers or Mr. Pumblechook.Gail: Wow, great analogies. Plus, it is indeed possible you spend more time thinking about Mike Pence than you ought to.Bret: Here’s a guy who makes his career on the Moral Majority wing of the Republican Party, until he hitches his wagon to the most immoral man ever to win a big-ticket presidential nomination. Phyllis Schlafly deciding to elope with Larry Flynt would have made more sense. Then Pence spends four years as the most servile, toadying, obsequious, fawning, head-nodding, yes-siring, anything-you-say-boss vice president in history. He’ll do anything for Trump’s love — but not, as the singer Meat Loaf might have said, attempt to steal the presidential election in broad daylight.For this, Trump rewards Pence by throwing him to a mob, who tried to hunt him down and hang him. But even now Pence can’t get crosswise with his dark lord, so the idea of him ever taking the party in an anti-Trump direction seems like a fantasy.Gail: You have convinced me that Pence is too much of a wimp to rebel. But you can never tell — look what happened to Mitt Romney.Bret: Unlike Pence, Romney is a true Christian, with actual principles. As for Nikki Haley, I just don’t see her winning the Republican nomination. She’s just not Trumpy enough. My bet is on the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, with Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina as his vice-presidential nominee. Crazy?Gail: Oh God. What a combo. l hear there’s a “Ron Be Gone” movement in Florida. Maybe they can combine it with a “Tim, Don’t Get In.” Or just: “Not Scott.”Bret: DeSantis is a very shrewd guy. He’s made a point of staying close to Trump, personally, and he’s also been very good at baiting the media. His handling of the pandemic was better than most liberals will ever give him credit for, because, unlike Andrew “I’m-still-standing” Cuomo, he made a point of protecting nursing homes. With Scott on the ticket he could also peel off some of the Black vote, or at least make white suburban voters feel comfortable about voting for a G.O.P. ticket that progressives will inevitably attack as racist.Of course none of that will stop Trump from turning on DeSantis if he decides to run again in 2024, and I have to assume there are skeletons in the governor’s closet. In the words of the immortal Beatles song, “Everybody’s got something to hide except me and my monkey.”Gail: Right now the only thing we’re thinking about in DeSantis’s state is the terrible condo collapse near Miami. There are going to be lots of questions about how that disaster came to be, and the government’s role in ensuring public safety.Bret: It’s so heartbreaking. I have my own memories of what it’s like, from having lived through the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, which killed thousands of people and flattened a lot of buildings in the vicinity of my dad’s office. It’s hard to think of a more awful way to go.But I’d hate to see the issue politicized. Buildings collapse in cities and states run by Democrats, too, like the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans a couple of years ago.Gail: Good point. But you will remember DeSantis is also the guy who’s been fighting against vaccine requirements on cruise ships.Bret: Sounds like an unreasonable government restriction on private enterprise trying to make the rules for what’s allowed on their premises.By the way, I’m increasingly of the view that Medicare and health insurance companies should refuse to underwrite treatment for any non-vaccinated people who wind up getting sick. People who take unreasonable private risks shouldn’t be allowed to socialize the cost of the consequences. What do you think?Gail: When said unvaccinated people get sick they’re going to need medical care. Which, if they’re uninsured and of low income, is going to have to be taken care of by the taxpayer unless the hospitals are directed to refuse to admit the unvaccinated critically ill.Bret: True, though my scheme would only apply to anti-vaxxers who refused to get a vaccine, not those who just didn’t have access to it. It’s never going to happen, for the same reason that we’re probably not going to deny coverage for lung cancer patients because they happen to be ex-smokers. But I just wish we lived in a country where being willfully dumb was a little more costly.Gail: Make being willfully dumb a little more costly — I think you’ve got a campaign slogan, Bret. Don’t let Mike Pence get his hands on it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More