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    The Rise of Eric Adams and Black New York

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    It was winter in Black New York, and the last thing Eric Leroy Adams wanted to do was join the New York City Police Department.It was the early 1980s and waves of joblessness and crime were sweeping over working-class swaths of the city. In Black neighborhoods, the Police Department, still overwhelmingly white, had become an occupying force, deepening the misery and the injustice.Inside a Brooklyn church, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a veteran of the civil rights movement, told a young Mr. Adams, then a local college student, that it was time to join the N.Y.P.D. The community, Mr. Daughtry said, needed someone to make change from the inside.“You gotta be out of your mind,” Mr. Adams recalls telling Mr. Daughtry.On Jan. 1, when Mr. Adams, 61, is sworn in as mayor, Mr. Daughtry’s vision will be realized. Working-class Black New York, which makes up the heart of the Democratic base but has long been shut out of City Hall, will finally have its moment.To many, the future mayor is still an enigma. The Black Democrat talks of law and order, but also Black Lives Matter. He courts Wall Street, then travels to Ghana to be spiritually cleansed. He parties late into the night alongside the rapper Ja Rule and the former Google C.E.O. Eric Schmidt. His talent and intellect are obvious. But he sounds nothing like Barack Obama.What exactly Mr. Adams intends to do once at City Hall is unclear. What is certain for now is that Mr. Adams knows who sent him there.New York’s Black Democratic base had endured a plague and marched for Black lives. They had kept the city going, along with municipal workers of all backgrounds, while wealthier New Yorkers remained safely at home. They had felt the rise in violence in their neighborhoods, and seen the resurgence of white supremacy under President Donald Trump. Their choice for mayor was Eric Adams.In his victory speech in November, Mr. Adams said his election belonged to the city’s working poor. “I am you. I am you. After years of praying and hoping and struggling and working, we are headed to City Hall,” Mr. Adams boomed. “It is proof that people of this city will love you if you love them.”New York’s first Black mayor, David Dinkins, died last year at the age of 93. A soft-spoken Marine, in his signature bow tie, he made plain he intended to serve the entire city, which he famously called a “gorgeous mosaic.” Mr. Dinkins served just one term in office after he was ousted by Rudy Giuliani in 1993 in an election fraught with racist backlash. It was a bitter defeat Black New York would never forget.Mr. Dinkins was part of a storied tradition of Black politicians from Harlem that included Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Charles Rangel, Percy Sutton, and Basil Paterson. The political club swung Black votes in the city for more than a generation.Mr. Adams’s pathway to Gracie Mansion runs through a different New York.He was born in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn, among the poorest neighborhoods in the city. Later, the family moved to South Jamaica, a largely Black enclave in Queens. Like many of his neighbors, Mr. Adams grew up poor, the fourth of six children of Dorothy Mae Adams, a single mother who worked cleaning houses, and later, at a day care center.At 15, Mr. Adams was arrested on a criminal trespass charge for entering the home of an acquaintance. He has said he was beaten so severely by police officers that his urine was filled with blood for a week.Several years later, Mr. Adams met the Rev. Herbert Daughtry. The pastor was recruiting young Black New Yorkers to organize Brooklyn’s struggling communities as part of the National Black United Front, a Black empowerment group.“It was a tough time,” Mr. Daughtry, now 90 years old, said in a phone interview. Mr. Adams stood out. “He was rather precocious,” Mr. Daughtry said. “He didn’t just want a job. He was concerned about the lack of progress, the gang violence, the addiction.”Mr. Adams joined the N.Y.P.D. in 1984 and served in the Police Department for 22 years. He co-founded 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a group that protested police brutality. He also served as president of the Grand Council of Guardians, a statewide group of Black law enforcement officials.He was protesting police brutality in the late 1980s when he met the Rev. Al Sharpton. Both were the sons of single mothers who had arrived in New York from Alabama.And both men said they reveled in eschewing the snobbishness exuded by the Black elite: a small but dazzling world of the powerful — if not always wealthy — shaped by historic college fraternities and sororities, and exclusive societies like the Boulé (boo-lay) and The Links. The groups were created in the depths of segregation to help members network and uplift the Black community. Some of the organizations are over a century old.“Me and Eric used to tease each other,” Mr. Sharpton told me recently. “I used to say, ‘You’re the guy with the patrolman’s hat and I’m the guy with the conked hair style like James Brown, and we do not care if the bougies don’t like us,’” he said. “We used to laugh about that.”Mr. Dinkins was a member of Sigma Pi Phi, known as the Boulé. That fraternity, among the most exclusive of the bunch, counted Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a member. Percy Sutton, once the highest ranking Black elected official in New York, belonged to Kappa Alpha Psi — one of the “Divine Nine” historically Black fraternities and sororities. Representative Hakeem Jeffries is also a member of Kappa Alpha Psi. Former Representative Charles Rangel is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha but only joined Boulé several years ago (“They never invited me” before that, he said). Vice President Kamala Harris is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha.“I’m not part of any of those things, you know what I’m saying?” Mr. Adams told me. “But the energy and spirit they bring, we need that.”By 2006, Mr. Adams had risen to the rank of captain, but his public advocacy had made him a thorn in the side of the N.Y.P.D.’s clubby, white male brass. He left the department and was quickly elected to the State Senate. In 2013, he was elected Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial role — but a good launching pad for a campaign for mayor.In the decades since David Dinkins had left office, the center of Black life and political power had shifted firmly from Harlem to Brooklyn. Letitia James, the state attorney general, is from Brooklyn. Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate, is also from Brooklyn. Representative Hakeem Jeffries represents part of the borough, as well as a part of Queens.Making the rise of these Black politicians possible was a decades-long shift to an increasingly diverse electorate from one that had once been dominated by white voters. Some white Democrats have proven more willing to vote for Black candidates. The changes have turned Brooklyn into a political powerhouse.In 2013, that Brooklyn coalition, led by Black voters, sent Mayor Bill de Blasio to Gracie Mansion.Then, in early 2020, the pandemic hit New York City, claiming tens of thousands of lives. It killed people from all walks of life, but hit especially hard in the minority and immigrant communities in the Democratic base. Every level of government, including City Hall, had failed them.A year later, the Democratic primary included three major Black candidates. One of them, Maya Wiley, a progressive, garnered significant support. But working-class Black New York went with Mr. Adams, handing him a narrow victory. Basil Smikle, director of the public policy program at Hunter College, said they wanted someone who understood their everyday lives. “The Dinkinses and the Obamas of the world, yes it’s aspirational, we’d all like our children to grow up to be them,” said Mr. Smikle, who is Black. “But to what extent do you know how people are living?”Mr. Adams’s political showmanship doesn’t hurt.In 2016, when Mr. Adams became a vegan, reversing a diabetes diagnosis, he touted the diet as a way to liberate Black Americans from the history of slavery and published a cookbook.Years earlier, in the State Senate, Mr. Adams produced a dramatized video from his office encouraging parents to search their children’s belongings for contraband. “You don’t know what your child may be hiding,” Mr. Adams tells the camera, pulling a gun out of a jewelry box. The political stunt left political insiders giggling. But it demonstrated how deeply connected Mr. Adams was to the voters he represented.“It is comical, but let me tell you, my mom would probably be nodding her head for the entire video,” said Zellnor Myrie, 35, who holds Mr. Adams’s former Senate seat, and was raised in the district by his mother.Much of what appears to be paradoxical about Mr. Adams is, to Black Americans, just familiar.“All of us have been at dinner with some uncle who talks about ‘Black on Black’ crime,” said Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University. “We know Eric Adams.”Yet, Mr. Adams is familiar to New Yorkers of many backgrounds. They recognize the swagger of the beat cop; the blunt cadence of southeast Queens, with its languorous vowels; the hustle and ambition found all over New York.Starting Jan. 1, he will be mayor for the entire city. His support is expansive and includes large numbers of Asian, Latino and Orthodox Jewish voters. If he can cement this coalition, he may become a formidable force nationally in a Democratic Party hungry for stars.Mr. Adams has also shown a savvy for courting The New York Post, announcing his pick for police commissioner — Nassau County chief of detectives Keechant Sewell, a Black Queens native — in the right-wing tabloid. Better to feed the beast, Mr. Adams understands, than let it maul you.At his inner circle, though, is a tight-knit group of Black New Yorkers who have waited a generation for their shot to run City Hall.Outside a public school in Brooklyn recently, Mr. Adams stood with David Banks, a veteran Black educator he tapped to serve as schools chancellor. “If 65 percent of white children were not reaching proficiency in this city, they would burn the city down,” Mr. Adams said to the enthusiastic, largely nonwhite crowd.From the moneyed corners of Manhattan to the gracious brownstones of Cobble Hill, there is a creeping sense of shock: The new mayor is not necessarily speaking to them. Power in America’s largest city has changed hands.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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      Glass Ceiling Persists for Women in Mayor’s Race

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      Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley placed second and third in the Democratic mayoral primary. Many New Yorkers hoped the glass ceiling would finally be broken.It was a constant refrain for the two leading female candidates running for mayor of New York City: The city has had 109 mayors, and all of them were men. It was finally time for a woman.The two candidates, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, had experience in government. They had major endorsements from unions, elected officials and newspaper editorial boards. They raised millions of dollars and gained momentum in the final weeks of the campaign.But Ms. Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, and Ms. Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, still fell short, placing second and third in the Democratic primary behind Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.New York is one of a handful of major cities where voters have yet to elect a woman as mayor, along with Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia. Boston recently got its first female mayor, and women currently run more than 30 of the nation’s 100 largest cities.Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia won more than 380,000 first-choice votes between them, or nearly 41 percent of the votes. Ms. Garcia finished just one percentage point behind Mr. Adams under the city’s new ranked-choice voting system.But their loss felt like a missed opportunity for those who believed that New York would at long last elect a woman.“I’m disappointed and sad,” said Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker who ran for mayor in 2013. “I give a lot of credit to Eric Adams, but I want a woman to be mayor of New York. It is truly, truly disheartening.”Maya Wiley garnered the second highest number of first-place votes, but finished in third place under the ranked-choice voting system.Sara Naomi Lewkowicz for The New York TimesThe Democratic primary field was the most diverse ever: Four women were on the ballot including Dianne Morales, a former nonprofit executive, and Joycelyn Taylor, a businesswoman. A fifth, Loree Sutton, a retired Army brigadier general, dropped out of the race in March. Of 13 candidates on the ballot, only three were white men; if he is elected in November, Mr. Adams will be the city’s second Black mayor.This was the first time New York City used ranked-choice voting in a citywide election, allowing voters to choose up to five candidates in order of preference. In other cities, candidates have often formed alliances to boost their chances.While Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley each ran strong campaigns that embraced the notion that it was time for a woman to lead the nation’s largest city, they did so independently.The two campaigns had discussions about Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley campaigning together and Ms. Garcia wanted to do it, according to a person who was familiar with the discussions.But Ms. Wiley appeared to have reservations on a policy level; Ms. Garcia was more conservative on policing, for instance, and was one of three candidates favored by the union that represents police officers. Ms. Wiley wanted to cut the police budget by $1 billion a year.Observers also suggested Ms. Garcia may have had more to gain from an alliance than Ms. Wiley. Some of Ms. Garcia’s moderate voters, for instance, might not have voted for Ms. Wiley even if the candidates campaigned together.Ms. Garcia instead struck a late alliance with Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate, and that helped win over some of his supporters.Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she did not have any regrets over her decision not to campaign with other candidates.“We stood as a campaign on principle, and we stood with everyone who met our principles,” she said.Nearly 130,000 of Ms. Wiley’s votes — roughly half of her total support — were reallocated to Ms. Garcia under ranked-choice voting once Ms. Wiley was eliminated; Mr. Adams received nearly 20 percent of Ms. Wiley’s votes. The rest of the ballots were “exhausted” or eliminated in the final round because the voters did not rank either finalist. In the end, Ms. Garcia lost to Mr. Adams by less than 8,500 votes. Ester Fuchs, a political science professor at Columbia University, said it would have been a smart strategy for Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley to endorse each other, despite their differences, to give each a better chance at beating Mr. Adams.“Why did Adams start panicking when Yang and Garcia campaigned for one day together?” she said. “Garcia did get quite a few of Yang’s voters. That’s how ranked-choice voting can work.”The new voting system also could have hurt Ms. Wiley’s chances in a less obvious way: Under the old system, Ms. Wiley — who finished with the second-most number of first-place votes — would have moved on to face Mr. Adams in a head-to-head runoff election.Women are expected to make gains in the City Council, which could have a majority of female members for the first time next year. But the major citywide offices — mayor, comptroller and public advocate — will be occupied by men, and potentially four of the five borough presidents will be men as well.Still, Ms. Wiley said on Wednesday that she and Ms. Garcia had made significant strides for women in the city.“We did shatter the glass ceiling,” she said. “The glass ceiling that said that women could not be top-tier candidates. The glass ceiling that said women would be discounted. The glass ceiling that said we can’t be seen as leaders, and I think we demonstrated that is not true.”Ms. Garcia also referred to the glass ceiling in her concession speech, delivered in front of a women’s suffrage monument in Central Park featuring Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. Ms. Wiley had held a major event earlier in the campaign in front of the statue, appearing alongside Gloria Steinem, the feminist icon.“This campaign has come closer than any other moment in history to breaking that glass ceiling in selecting New York City’s first female mayor,” Ms. Garcia said. “We cracked the hell out of it, and it’s ready to be broken.”While some voters were excited simply to vote for a woman, many others were focused on ideology or experience, and were drawn to Ms. Garcia’s experience as a manager or Ms. Wiley’s progressive values. Michele Bogart, an art history professor in her 60s who lives in Brooklyn, ranked Ms. Garcia first and left Ms. Wiley off her ballot.“She increasingly struck me as a solid, can-do sort of official,” she said of Ms. Garcia.Catt Small, 31, a designer in Brooklyn, voted for Ms. Wiley first and also ranked Ms. Morales and Ms. Taylor on her ballot. After Mr. Adams won, Ms. Small was rethinking whether she should have ranked Ms. Garcia fifth to try and block him.“I ranked so many women and so many women of color on my ballot,” she said. “I was really hopeful that this was going to be the time.”Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley both faced an array of challenges during the campaign. They had some institutional support, but less than Mr. Adams did. They were also not viewed as seriously early on as Mr. Yang, even though he had less experience than they did, said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, which analyzes women’s political participation.Some voters also have reservations about electing women to executive jobs like mayor or president, Ms. Walsh said, and those may have come into play. These voters tend to be more comfortable seeing women in legislative roles.“When they’re trying for that top job where the buck stops, there are still gender stereotypes about who can lead,” she said.Voters might also have believed that a male candidate would be tougher on crime. The city has never had a female police commissioner, for instance, though Mr. Adams says he wants to change that. During the campaign, Mr. Adams focused intensely on public safety — the top issue for many voters — and highlighted his experience as a former police captain. And although Ms. Wiley and Ms. Garcia both surged toward the end of the campaign, the momentum came too late to lift them to victory.Ms. Wiley, for example, won early support from the powerful 1199 SEIU union, but progressive leaders like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse her until June. Ms. Garcia did not register high in the polls until she secured endorsements from The New York Times and the New York Daily News in May.Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley faced less overt sexism during the campaign than Ms. Quinn, who lost to Mr. de Blasio in 2013 and was criticized for being unlikable, dowdy and not feminine enough. Ruth W. Messinger, a former Manhattan borough president, faced similar attacks over her appearance when she was the Democratic nominee for mayor in 1997.One notable difference was that more female reporters were covering the race than in the past and they covered gender with more nuance, Ms. Fuchs said.“Gender did not hurt them for the first time in my lifetime,” Ms. Fuchs said of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley. “The media did not weaponize gender in this race.”The candidates did call out examples of what they viewed as sexism on the campaign trail. Ms. Garcia grew frustrated when Mr. Yang repeatedly said that he wanted to hire her for his administration; she insisted that she wanted to be the mayor, not work for one. Ms. Wiley argued that she was receiving unfair criticism over her ties to Mr. de Blasio instead of being judged on her own record.Ms. Quinn said she thought both women were held to a higher standard than their male rivals. “They had to be more substantive and more competent than the men to even be considered on par,” she said.And ultimately, she suggested, some New Yorkers may simply not have been comfortable voting for a woman.“I don’t know if voters are even aware of it,” Ms. Quinn said. “I think it is for many voters ingrained in their being from having lived in such a sexist society for their entire lives.”But Ms. Sutton, who endorsed Ms. Garcia after she dropped out of the race, said that while she was sad about the outcome, she was confident that a woman would be elected mayor soon.“She was one percentage point away — it’s heartbreaking yet it’s also exhilarating,” she said. “It should make New York power brokers pay attention.”Michael Gold contributed reporting. More

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      What to Expect From Tuesday’s Vote Tally in the N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race

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      The new results should include most of the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots, which were not included in last week’s count.New York City’s Board of Elections will release a new tally of votes in the Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday. Let’s hope it goes better than it did last week, when officials announced inaccurate figures and had to retract them.The updated tally on Tuesday should include most of the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots, which were not included in the first count. It should give us a better sense of who is likely to win the race, though final results are not expected until next week.In the corrected preliminary tally released after the retraction last week, Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, was leading his closest rival, Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner, by just 14,755 votes, a margin of around 2 percentage points. Mr. Adams needs to hold on to his lead, while Ms. Garcia is hoping to overtake him by winning more absentee votes in Manhattan and by appearing on more ballots as voters’ second or third choice. Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, was in third place and believes she still has a chance to win.If Mr. Adams does win the primary — and the general election in November — he would be the city’s second Black mayor after David N. Dinkins, who was elected in 1989. Ms. Wiley is also Black; she and Ms. Garcia are both seeking to become the first woman to be elected mayor of New York.The city’s new ranked-choice voting system allowed voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Since no one won more than 50 percent of first-choice votes for mayor, the winner will be decided by a process of elimination: Lower-polling candidates are dropped out in rounds, with the votes initially counted for them distributed to whichever candidate their voters ranked next.Officials did not say when to expect the results on Tuesday, but the Board of Elections announced in a cryptic post on Twitter in the morning that the new results should arrive during “brunch special” hours instead of “club hours” late at night. That prompted a playful debate on social media over when exactly it is appropriate to eat brunch in New York City. But the clock ticked into the later afternoon hours without results, bringing early dinner within view. More

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      More Results Expected in the Mayor’s Race

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      [Want to get New York Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.]It’s Tuesday. Weather: Humid and mostly sunny, with a high in the mid-90s, and watch out for a severe storm this evening. Dangerously hot weather is expected through tomorrow. Alternate-side parking: In effect until July 19 (Eid al-Adha). Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesIt has been two weeks since New York City residents last cast ballots in the Democratic mayoral primary. And while Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, holds a lead in the results released so far, it is not yet clear who will win.Today, elections officials are poised to release a new tally of results that could shed more light on who will ultimately prevail: a tabulation that incorporates for the first time the votes of tens of thousands of New Yorkers who cast ballots by mail.How did we get here?Under the city’s new ranked-choice system, voters could rank up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference.Two weeks ago, elections officials began releasing preliminary results that included the first-choice votes of people who cast their ballots in person during the early-voting period or on Primary Day. In those results, Mr. Adams led Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, by 9.6 percentage points, and Kathryn Garcia, a former sanitation commissioner, by 12.5 points.But since Mr. Adams did not get more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes, the ranked-choice system kicks in: lowest-polling candidates are eliminated a round at a time, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidate those voters ranked next.A preliminary ranked-choice tabulation was conducted last week, showing Ms. Garcia trailing Mr. Adams by only two percentage points.That tally, however, did not include the votes of any of roughly 125,000 outstanding absentee ballots.What happens today?Elections officials are expected to conduct another ranked-choice tabulation that includes most of those absentee ballots.For either Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley to beat Mr. Adams, they would need a strong showing in these results.Is it over after today?No. Voters are still allowed to correct errors with mail-in ballot envelopes that might prevent their ballots from being counted until this Friday. Final results are expected to arrive sometime next week.And the campaigns of Ms. Wiley, Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia have filed lawsuits preserving their right to challenge the election results.From The Times‘Maybe We Can Be Friends’: New Yorkers Re-emerge in a Changed CityA Gifted Writer Returns With a Supremely Harrowing NovelMoving Downtown, to the Center of the ActionMet Opera Strikes Deal With Stagehands Over Pandemic PayWant more news? Check out our full coverage.The Mini Crossword: Here is today’s puzzle.What we’re readingAbout 65,000 shells and aerial effects were launched from five barges near Midtown and Long Island City in what organizers billed as the biggest July 4 show ever. [Gothamist]A 33-year-old man was fatally shot outside a public housing development in the Bronx, police said. [Daily News]City officials are considering a proposal to create 24-hour entertainment districts where people can party all night. [Associated Press]And finally: A library transformed The Times’s James S. Russell writes:Muddling along for four decades in a nondescript former department store, the Mid-Manhattan library, at Fifth Avenue and 40th Street, served a growing swarm of local residents and commuters. But the branch steadily became dilapidated — an “embarrassment” to the New York Public Library system, as Anthony W. Marx, its president, put it.After three years of construction and $200 million, the library system was ready to reopen its largest circulating branch in spring 2020. Instead, the pandemic extended the closure. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, as it is now known (after a $55 million gift), finally threw open its doors to unlimited browsing in June.Its theatrically expressive heart is a dramatic atrium billowing upward from the second floor, displaying the vast circulating collection of up to 400,000 volumes. The branch is phasing in its extensive programming over the coming months. (The New York and Queens library systems will fully reopen today, and Brooklyn will follow a few days later.)Libraries have taken on the great task of helping people acquire knowledge, whatever the means of delivery, and have become more central to community life. The sociologist Eric Klinenberg made libraries Exhibit A in his 2018 book, “Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.” He argued that “social infrastructure” — public places where people mingle and interact — can help reduce crime, isolation, and even strengthen communities.It’s Tuesday — how about a new book?Metropolitan Diary: Last car Dear Diary:I parked my car at an outdoor lot near Madison Square Garden while my friend and I went to the Rangers game. After the game, we walked to Virgil’s and spent some time catching up over a leisurely barbecue dinner.On the way back to the car, I got a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach when the parking lot came into view. From a distance, it appeared that my car was the only one left in the lot.My uneasy feeling was soon justified. When I left the car there earlier in the evening, I had somehow failed to notice the sign clearly stating that the lot closed at 11 p.m.As my friend and I stood helplessly at the locked gate pondering our stupidity and predicament, I saw a piece of paper taped to the fence and flapping in the wind. It was a handwritten note.“I’m in the Irish pub around the corner,” it said. “Meet me there.”— Vincent BucciIllustrated by Agnes Lee. Read more Metropolitan Diary here.New 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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      Absentee Ballots May Determine if Eric Adams Wins Mayor's Race

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      The tallying of more than 125,000 absentee ballots will determine whether Eric Adams retains his lead in the Democratic primary.In a bland, sprawling warehouse in Manhattan, election workers carefully inspected piles of absentee ballots on Friday, an exercise that might be described as tedious if it were not so important.The ballots will most likely decide the winner of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary, a race that is currently led by Eric Adams, who is seeking to become the city’s second Black mayor. His lead over his two closest rivals, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, was small enough that either could theoretically pass him once more than 125,000 absentee ballots are factored in.But Mr. Adams’s campaign suggested that its informal, unofficial tally of the absentee ballots counted so far indicated that he might have slightly widened his lead in first-place votes — placing an even heavier burden on Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley to close the gap through the city’s new ranked-choice voting system.Under that system, voters could rank up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference. Because Mr. Adams did not collect more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the process moves to an elimination-round method: The lowest-polling candidates are eliminated a round at a time, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidate those voters ranked next. The process continues until there is a winner.In the first round, among people who cast their ballots in person during the early-voting period or on Primary Day, Mr. Adams led Ms. Wiley by 9.6 percentage points, and Ms. Garcia by 12.5 points. When a preliminary ranked-choice tabulation was conducted on Wednesday, Ms. Garcia edged slightly ahead of Ms. Wiley, and trailed Mr. Adams by only two points.The city’s Board of Elections began counting absentee ballots on Monday and plans to release a new ranked-choice tally that includes most of them on Tuesday. A board spokeswoman declined on Friday to discuss the results of the counting until then.For either Ms. Garcia or Ms. Wiley to overtake Mr. Adams, they must outperform him in first-place absentee votes, or hope that enough absentee voters ranked him low on their ballots or left him off entirely.The city Board of Elections is expected to release the results of the absentee voting on Tuesday.Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesMs. Garcia, who beat Mr. Adams in Manhattan in the in-person vote tally, also showed strength in absentee ballots from the borough, according to a preliminary count of unofficial results obtained by The New York Times. She was the first choice on 9,043 ballots of 23,739 ballots counted as of Thursday night, or about 38 percent. She was the second or third choice on another 7,187 ballots.Mr. Adams was the first choice on 2,999 absentee ballots from Manhattan, or about 13 percent, and the second or third choice on another 5,304. Manhattan was the only borough he did not win in the in-person tally. The absentee ballots’ importance was underscored by how many campaign workers and volunteers have been observing the vetting and counting process this week.On Friday, Ms. Wiley had several volunteers at a site in Manhattan where absentee ballots were being counted. Mr. Adams’s campaign had many more — a sign that his campaign, with more money and institutional support, has often been more muscular and organized than those of his rivals.Mr. Adams had a team of volunteers seated at every table, diligently tallying his votes and Ms. Garcia’s with pens and notebooks. Occasionally, a volunteer challenged a ballot’s legitimacy over a signature or date.At one point, a small commotion could be heard.A volunteer for Mr. Adams was challenging a ballot backing Ms. Garcia because it had a stray pen mark. Election workers and campaign volunteers gathered around the table to scrutinize the ballot, and then set it aside for further examination.“Our team has been here all week making sure every single vote is counted,” said Ydanis Rodriguez, a City Council member from Upper Manhattan who is an ally of Mr. Adams’s. Mr. Rodriguez was leading the Adams campaign’s presence at the elections board site, leaving only briefly on Wednesday to vote on the city budget.Ms. Garcia’s campaign did not have volunteers at the Manhattan site, but her representatives said that members of the campaign’s legal team — including the prominent election lawyers Stanley Schlein and Sarah Steiner — were monitoring the proceedings.Ms. Wiley’s campaign sent an email to supporters on Thursday seeking volunteers to visit absentee sites on Friday.“All ballots have been cast, and while we cannot persuade any more New Yorkers to vote for Team Maya, we can make sure that every single vote counts, and is counted accurately!” the email said.The campaigns are allowed to monitor the absentee count and to challenge ballots that may be ineligible. Election workers wore face masks on Friday and held ballots up against a plastic partition so that campaign volunteers could read them. One ballot, for instance, had several first choices marked for mayor. An election worker told volunteers that it would be considered void when it went through a ballot-scanning machine.Ms. Wiley’s campaign filed a lawsuit on Thursday preserving its right to challenge the election results, following similar moves by the campaigns of Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia. Ms. Wiley argued that a full hand recount should be required if a decision about who gets eliminated under ranked-choice voting comes down to a “razor-thin” margin.Under the preliminary ranked-choice tally conducted Wednesday, Ms. Wiley fell just short of getting to the final round, trailing Ms. Garcia by fewer than 350 votes.“This is a wide-open race and as is standard procedure, my campaign filed a petition to preserve the right to challenge the results should we believe it is necessary,” Ms. Wiley said in a statement on Friday. “For now, we must allow the democratic process to continue and ensure every vote is counted transparently.”The Board of Elections is under close scrutiny after an embarrassing fiasco on Tuesday that forced it to retract preliminary ranked-choice vote totals it had released just hours before.The board had mistakenly included more than 130,000 sample ballots, used to test the ranked-choice software, in the preliminary count. The board ran the ranked-choice program again on Wednesday, with the result again showing Mr. Adams ahead of Ms. Garcia and Ms. Wiley.Despite the vote-count debacle, Dawn Sandow, the board’s deputy executive director, sent a congratulatory email to staff members on Thursday. In the email, Ms. Sandow acknowledged that there had been “negative articles bashing this agency,” but she insisted that board employees had risen to the occasion.“The amount of changes thrown at us to implement in a short period of time during a worldwide pandemic was unsurmountable,” she wrote, “and WE DID IT ALL SUCCESSFULLY!”Dana Rubinstein and Katie Glueck contributed reporting. More

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      In Chaotic Mayor’s Race, It’s All Down to the Absentee Ballots

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      The Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, now a tight race among Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley, will be decided by absentee ballots.Fresh off a vote-counting debacle that caught national attention, the chaotic New York City Democratic mayoral primary is moving into a new phase: the wait for absentee ballots.A preliminary, nonbinding tally of ranked-choice votes on Wednesday showed a highly competitive race, with Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, holding a lead of about two percentage points over Kathryn Garcia, a former city sanitation commissioner. Under the ranked-choice elimination-round process, Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, finished just behind Ms. Garcia, trailing by fewer than 350 votes.But those results do not account for the roughly 125,000 Democratic absentee ballots submitted, and the race might look different once all eligible ballots have been accounted for.No one knows with any certainty how the absentee ballots will shape the outcome, though many political junkies and campaign officials are trying to game that out. Here is a look at what the data suggests, and a guide to what to watch for as New York moves closer to determining the Democratic nominee.When will we know who won?Final results are expected to arrive the week of July 12.Before that happens, the Board of Elections needs to finish counting the absentee ballots, a process that began on Monday. Those ballots that have been counted by July 6 will then be factored into a new ranked-choice tally that will be released on that date.The city’s new ranked-choice voting system allows voters to rank up to five candidates on their ballots in preferential order. Because Mr. Adams did not receive more than 50 percent of first-choice votes, the winner must be decided by a process of elimination: Lower-polling candidates are eliminated in separate rounds, with their votes distributed to whichever candidate those voters ranked next. The process continues until there is a winner.The board must also consider absentee ballots that were initially deemed invalid, as well as affidavit ballots that were filed on Primary Day by voters who were told they were ineligible, but cast provisional ballots that would be counted if they were later deemed eligible.So is it officially a two-person race?No. While Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia were the last two candidates standing in the latest round of results released on Wednesday, those numbers were preliminary and could change as more absentee ballots are accounted for. Ms. Wiley remains in the mix.In Wednesday’s tally of ranked-choice voting, Kathryn Garcia took slightly more of Andrew Yang’s redistributed votes than Eric Adams.Andrew Seng for The New York TimesDid the campaigns push absentee voting?Yes.Advisers for all three of the leading campaigns said that they engaged in so-called ballot-chasing efforts: direct follow-ups with voters who had requested absentee ballots, reminding those voters to return the ballots. The results in coming weeks will offer a sense of who ran the most sophisticated campaign on that front.As voters requested absentee ballots, the Adams campaign sent them personalized letters — regardless of whether they believed those voters were ranking Mr. Adams as their first choice — and added those voters to their broader communications strategy, following up by email and phone, as well as by mail.Mr. Adams may also benefit from his significant institutional support. He was backed by several major labor unions, an often-important dynamic in turnout efforts, and his consulting firm has particular experience with absentee ballots: It assisted the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, in her 2019 race against Tiffany Cabán — a contest decided by absentee votes.The Wiley campaign used phone-banking and texting to urge Democrats who requested absentee ballots to send them in, focusing on absentee voters who they believed might support Ms. Wiley.The Garcia campaign also sought names of voters who requested absentee ballots and followed up with them by mail and phone. Absentee voting was also a factor in shaping the timing of outreach strategies like digital engagement, a Garcia adviser said.Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, held a lead of about two percentage points over Ms. Garcia after a preliminary, nonbinding ranked-choice tally.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesCould Mr. Adams still lose?In the first round of votes, among people who voted in-person early and on Primary Day, Mr. Adams was in first place, leading Ms. Wiley by 9.6 percentage points, and Ms. Garcia by 12.5 points. But when the preliminary ranked-choice tabulation was conducted, Ms. Garcia narrowly moved into second place and trailed Mr. Adams by only two points.It seems clear that the race is still an open three-way contest, but a final ranked-choice contest between Mr. Adams and Ms. Garcia, compared with Mr. Adams and Ms. Wiley, might play out very differently.Sparse polls and interviews with party strategists and voters have suggested that Ms. Wiley’s voters — especially in places like Brownstone Brooklyn — often ranked Ms. Garcia on their ballots. But Ms. Garcia’s voters, especially the more moderate ones, were not always inclined to rank Ms. Wiley as high. That dynamic, if it holds, could make it more challenging for Ms. Wiley to pull ahead of Mr. Adams, even if she did surpass Ms. Garcia.Ms. Wiley, who emerged as the favorite of younger left-wing voters, may have also found it more difficult to connect with some who vote by mail, a group that has traditionally included older voters.Still, she had a burst of momentum in the final weeks of the race, and the absentee ballots from her strongholds could help boost her numbers. While Ms. Garcia was the favorite in vote-rich Manhattan, Ms. Wiley came in second in the first round of votes, and could see her numbers rise in some neighborhoods as absentee ballots come in.She emphasized that the contest was far from over.“It is a wide-open race,” she said on Thursday. “We’ve known it was a wide-open race since Primary Day, and it remains a deeply competitive race.”“We’ve known it was a wide-open race since Primary Day,” Maya Wiley said on Thursday. Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York TimesManhattan had the most absentee ballots. Whom does that help?Many of those ballots are likely to benefit Ms. Garcia, who, in the first round of voting, was dominant in Manhattan.For example, many people voted by mail in the affluent, well-educated neighborhoods that border Central Park — and among in-person returns, Ms. Garcia pulled off strong showings in those areas. Ms. Garcia, with her emphasis on competence over any ideological message, may have also been an especially strong fit for some types of absentee voters.“Historically, absentee ballots have tended to come from older, more highly educated, more affluent voters,” said Bruce Gyory, a veteran Democratic strategist who has closely studied the city’s electorate. He pointed to Garcia-friendly neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx. “Those are the kinds of voters who, particularly in Manhattan but also in the Brownstone belt, places like Riverdale, seem to have favored Garcia.”But on the first round of voting, Mr. Adams appeared to be the clear favorite in neighborhoods where many working-class Black and Latino voters live, and he also demonstrated some ability to connect with white voters with more moderate views.His allies argue that Ms. Garcia would have to pull in significant margins in Manhattan to cut into his expected lead in other parts of the city. The assembly districts where Mr. Adams had his strongest showings did cast fewer absentee ballots. But he led in more districts, and by higher margins, than Ms. Garcia overall.“It’s a fairly narrow path, and she would really have to overperform even in districts where she did well, in Queens and Brooklyn, and really run up the score in Manhattan,” said Neal Kwatra, who led a pro-Adams independent expenditure effort associated with a union representing hotel workers.Is there another key battleground?The second-largest number of absentee ballots were cast in Queens, where several candidates showed strength in the first round of voting.Mr. Adams, who won every borough but Manhattan in the first round, is likely to benefit from absentee ballots cast by Black homeowners in Southeast Queens, who tend to be more moderate. Ms. Wiley, who came in second place in Queens in the first round, was strong in Western Queens in particular, where many younger left-wing voters live; Ms. Garcia did well in places that are home to many white voters with more moderate views.Here is where ranked-choice voting may come into play.Andrew Yang, a former presidential candidate who has since dropped out of the race, did especially well in Asian American neighborhoods in Queens and elsewhere in the city. He spent the last days of the race campaigning with Ms. Garcia — but some voters may have cast their absentee ballots before that apparent alliance was struck.In Wednesday’s tally of ranked-choice voting, Ms. Garcia took slightly more of Mr. Yang’s redistributed votes than Mr. Adams. Ms. Garcia also took the vast majority of Ms. Wiley’s voters when her votes were reallocated.If those circumstances play out again, does that help Ms. Garcia significantly in Queens as well as in Brooklyn, where many absentee ballots are outstanding and where Ms. Wiley came out ahead of Ms. Garcia on the tally of first-place votes?“Queens seems to favor Adams, Manhattan favors Garcia — we don’t know who that balance is going to ultimately benefit,” Mr. Gyory said, allowing for the possibility that Ms. Wiley could pull ahead, too. Until the absentee ballots are “processed, opened and fully counted, I don’t think anybody should presume how they’re going to vote,” he added.Charlie Smart, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting. More

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      What to Know About the Vote Tally Fiasco

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

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

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

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      Absentee Votes Will Help Decide the Winner of the NYC Mayoral Primary

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      The outcome of the New York City mayor’s race will likely come down to the results of the more than 125,000 absentee ballots that still remain to be counted. According to preliminary and unofficial results released Wednesday, Eric Adams leads Kathryn Garcia by about 15,000 votes after all rounds of ranked-choice tabulation.Strong Election Day Support for Garcia in Districts With Most Absentee BallotsThe areas that cast the most absentee ballots were Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, where Kathryn Garcia drew stronger support in the Election Day vote tally. More than 125,000 absentee ballots received by the Board of Elections have yet to be counted in the Democratic mayoral primary. More