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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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      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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      N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race: Could the Top 3 Change Places?

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Thursday. Weather: Mostly sunny, with a high in the upper 70s. Alternate-side parking: In effect until July 4 (Independence Day). James Estrin/The New York Times and Earl Wilson/The New York TimesIt’s almost time for the ranked-choice process to play out.After Primary Day voting for Democratic candidates in the race for mayor, Eric Adams has a roughly nine-point lead over the second-place Maya Wiley, and stands about 12 points ahead of Kathryn Garcia. But with no candidate poised to reach 50 percent of first-place votes, New Yorkers’ ranked selections will come into play.The standings could still change. But overcoming Mr. Adams’s commanding lead would be tough.[Read more from my colleague Andy Newman on how the race could shake out.]Here’s what to know:Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia still have a path — a challenging one.If Ms. Wiley makes it to the final round of the ranked-choice playoff process and is ranked ahead of Mr. Adams on about 60 percent of all ballots where neither is ranked first, she could be victorious.Ms. Garcia would need to do the same by a few percentage points more to win.Those scenarios are not especially likely. Mr. Adams’s popularity among voters who did not rank him first would need to be particularly low, and at least one poll before Primary Day suggested that was not the case.Wait, what about the uncounted ballots?Many first-round votes still have not been tallied: in-person votes from about 15 percent of precincts and tens of thousands of absentee ballots.The ballots would need to overwhelmingly favor one contender to swing the election, but could move the candidates closer to or further from one another.A comeback has happened before.Some supporters of Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia cite a mayoral contest in Oakland, Calif., to justify optimism.In that city’s 2010 race, Don Perata, the former head of the California State Senate, led his opponent, Jean Quan, by 8.7 percentage points after the first round. But Ms. Quan garnered 68 percent of the votes from ballots that listed neither of the two candidates first.She narrowly won.But Ms. Quan and another progressive candidate, who finished third, had endorsed each other and rallied against ranking Mr. Perata on the ballot. Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley did not form an alliance with each other.A successful late surge is rare.In 128 ranked-choice races across the country where there was no first-round winner, a candidate trailing by more than eight points after the first round has only won three times, according to FairVote.No one trailing by 10 points has ever been victorious.More on the race for mayor:How Adams Built a Diverse Coalition That Put Him Ahead in the Mayor’s RaceBrooklyn Councilman Unites Progressives to Lead Comptroller’s Race From The TimesModest Rent Increases Approved for 2.3 Million N.Y.C. TenantsN.Y.C.’s Police Chokehold Ban Is Struck Down by CourtHow India Walton Pulled It Off in the Buffalo Mayoral PrimaryOn the Scene: A Summer Night Down the Shore in JerseyWant more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingThe disgraced R&B artist R. Kelly was transferred to a jail in Brooklyn this week ahead of his federal trial in August. [Daily News]The state attorney general’s office will not bring criminal charges against officers in Nassau County who opened fire and killed a 19-year-old in 2020. [QNS]A nearly 900-pound white shark has been spotted off the coast of Long Island and the Jersey Shore over the past several days. [NBC 4 New York]And finally: No more to-go cocktailsMore than a year after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo imposed it to help quell the coronavirus raging through the state, New York’s state of emergency will end today, the governor said.But the change comes with the loss of one popular pandemic-era practice: the executive order that had allowed bars and restaurants to sell to-go and delivery alcoholic beverages will also end after today, New York State’s Liquor Authority said on Twitter.[Read more from my colleagues Daniel E. Slotnik and Dan Levin on the change.]The state of emergency was declared on March 7, 2020, as New York City became one of the world’s hardest-hit places for Covid-19. Its end is another welcome sign of the state’s steady march back toward normalcy. The governor relaxed most of New York’s remaining virus restrictions last week.But many consumers have grown accustomed to takeout tequila and walkaway wine, and many bars and restaurants have come to rely on the business they generated.Andrew Rigie, the executive director of the New York City Hospitality Alliance, said the announcement came as a shock to some of his members, who thought takeout alcohol would be allowed at least through July 5, when the current rules were set to expire.“It’s a loss of an important revenue stream that’s helping them stay afloat,” Mr. Rigie said.It’s Thursday — pour one out.Metropolitan Diary: Hot pink umbrella Dear Diary:I was returning to work from a coffee run when I got caught in the start of a rainstorm without my umbrella.When I got to the corner at 77th Street and Columbus, I just missed the light to cross. A long line of waiting cars began its procession. I stood there, getting soaked.Then the downpour over me suddenly stopped. I whirled around. An older woman standing beside me had put her hot pink umbrella over the two of us.“I can keep you dry for a little while,” she said.I thanked her, laughing a little.“Was my misery so apparent?”“Your hair was wet.”The light changed, and we crossed the street together under the shelter of her umbrella.“How far do you have to go?” she asked.“Just here,” I said, pointing to the right. “I work at the museum.”She smiled.“Well,” she said, walking off, “have a lovely day!”— Camille JettaNew 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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      How Maya Wiley or Kathryn Garcia Could Beat Eric Adams

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      Under ranked-choice voting, it is mathematically possible for the second- and third-place finishers in Tuesday’s Democratic primary to overtake the front-runner — but it will be tough. It was the city’s first mayoral race using ranked-choice voting, and there was no incumbent running.After the first round of vote tallying, a relatively conservative male Democrat with a long history in elected office led the pack by nine percentage points, with two female candidates ranked second and third.In the end, the second-place finisher came from behind to score a narrow victory.It happened in Oakland, Calif., in 2010. Whether it can happen in New York City in 2021 is a question that has taken on great urgency.With partial results in on Wednesday afternoon, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, has 32 percent of first-place votes. He leads Maya Wiley, a former City Hall counsel, by 9 points, and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, by 12 points.Because Mr. Adams has almost no chance of garnering more than 50 percent of first-place votes, the ranked-choice playoff process will begin. It is a series of rounds in which the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and those votes are transferred to whomever the voter listed in the next slot, until only two candidates remain — at which point the leader wins.Ms. Wiley’s supporters hope that she can close the gap by picking up enough votes from voters who preferred her to Mr. Adams but did not rank her first. Ms. Garcia’s supporters are hoping for something similar.But both candidates face steep challenges to overcoming Mr. Adams’s commanding lead. Here is a brief explainer:Can Wiley or Garcia still win?Mathematically, yes. Ms. Wiley could win if she makes it to the final round and is ranked ahead of Mr. Adams on around 60 percent of all ballots where neither is ranked first. Ms. Garcia’s threshold in the same situation is a few points higher.What’s the likelihood of that?Low. Mr. Adams would have to be enormously unpopular among voters who did not rank him first, and one of the few polls done late in the race showed broader support for him than for Ms. Wiley or Ms. Garcia.The poll of 800 likely Democratic voters, conducted by Citizen Data and FairVote, a national organization that promotes ranked-choice voting, found that Mr. Adams was the only candidate in the race who was a top-three choice of more than half the voters.Kathryn Garcia campaigning on the Upper West Side on Tuesday. She was trailing Eric Adams in first-place votes by 12 points on Wednesday afternoon.Desiree Rios for The New York TimesThe poll tracks fairly closely with the actual first-round results reported so far: It showed Mr. Adams with 32 percent and Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia both with 18 percent. It was conducted before the race’s chaotic final weekend, when Mr. Adams was criticized for asserting that Ms. Garcia and Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, were trying to weaken Black candidates by campaigning together.That episode may have damaged Mr. Adams and helped Ms. Garcia, but not much, said Rob Richie, FairVote’s president. “My assumption is that the last three days didn’t change the fundamentals enough to actually change the outcome,” he said.To give a sense of Mr. Adams’s strength, in a final-round matchup between Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley based on the voter rankings in the FairVote poll, Ms. Wiley inherited 47 percent of Ms. Garcia’s first-place voters and Mr. Adams inherited 35 percent, but he still beat her by more than 10 points. In a similar matchup between Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia, she inherited more than 60 percent of Ms. Wiley’s first-place votes but still lost.Nevertheless, an undaunted Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she expected to significantly outpace Mr. Adams in collecting second- and third-choice votes and said she had no plan to concede, “because I’m winning.”How often does a trailing candidate in a ranked-choice election end up winning?Very rarely. In 128 ranked-choice races in the United States since 2004 where there was no first-round winner, there have been only three occasions where someone trailing by more than eight points after the first round ended up the victor, according to FairVote.No one trailing by 10 points has ever won, though in the 2018 San Francisco mayoral race, Mark Leno very nearly came from 12 points down to overtake London Breed. Ms. Breed wound up winning by less than a percentage point.What happened in the 2010 Oakland mayoral race?Don Perata, the former head of the California State Senate, led his more progressive opponents Jean Quan by 8.7 percentage points and Rebecca Kaplan by 12.2 points after the first round. But in the elimination rounds, Ms. Quan ended up with 68 percent of the votes from ballots that listed neither her nor Mr. Perata first, and she narrowly defeated him.There was a big difference, though, between that race and the New York race: Ms. Quan and Ms. Kaplan cross-endorsed each other and co-led an “anybody but Don” attack on Mr. Perata.“It was really cooperative campaigning between two people who were more on the left,” said Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “It was specifically about going against the perceived establishment candidate.”Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley formed no such alliance. During the campaign, Ms. Garcia seemed open to coalitions with other candidates and explored the possibility of working with Ms. Wiley, in addition to Mr. Yang.Ms. Wiley said she was invited to campaign with Ms. Garcia and Mr. Yang, but declined because of misgivings about Mr. Yang’s comments at the final debate about people with mental illness.What about the ballots that have yet to be tallied?As of Wednesday afternoon, the in-person votes from about 3 percent of election scanning machines had not been counted yet. Neither had tens of thousands of absentee ballots — a maximum of about 220,000.But they would have to overwhelmingly favor one candidate to swing the election, and unlike last fall’s Trump-Biden contest, there are no signs of that.The absentee ballots are widely thought to favor Ms. Garcia over Ms. Wiley because absentee voters tend to be older and Ms. Garcia had an older base, but only moderately.What about ‘exhausted ballots’?Those are ballots where every candidate ranked by the voter gets eliminated and thus the ballot no longer directly affects the outcome. The more exhausted ballots there are, the harder it is for a second-place candidate to catch the front-runner. In a race like this one, where there were many viable candidates and voters new to the ranked-choice system might be unwilling to rank a full slate, the possibility of exhausted ballots is high.How sure can we be about any of this?We can’t. We don’t know yet where voters ranked anyone other than their first-choice candidate. We don’t know how many ballots are outstanding, let alone how the candidates are ranked on them. That is why the official winner is likely not to be announced until the week of July 12.Anne Barnard, Nate Cohn, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Charlie Smart contributed reporting. More

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      Map: NYC Mayoral Primary Election Results

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      New York City voters cast their ballots for mayor on Tuesday, and it became clear that the competitive Democratic race would be decided by the city’s new ranked-choice system. It is likely to be weeks before a winner is known. The map below shows the latest unofficial results for the first round of votes, which […] More