What you should know
- About 125,000 absentee ballots are expected to be included in Tuesday’s primary results update from the New York City Board of Elections.
- Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has a slight edge over former Sanitation Commissioner at last count, while civil rights Maya Wiley also appears to have a chance to win.
- It was unclear if more absentee ballots could still be counted, as voters who made minor clerical errors still have some time to correct them and have their votes counted.
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NEW YORK – New York City Board of Elections officials plan to release an update that could be decisive on the results of the Democratic Mayor’s primary on Tuesday, two weeks after the polls closed and a week after that a counting error marred the debut of qualifying voting in the race for the nation’s most prominent municipal seat.
At the moment, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams leads the group of more than a dozen Democratic contenders. But former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia and civil rights attorney Maya Wiley also appear to have a chance to win in the complex classification and reassignment system, with about 125,000 absentee ballots yet to be added to the process.
The city’s Board of Elections has said it would release those results sometime Tuesday, though no specific date had been set. It was unclear if more absentee ballots could still be counted, as voters who made minor clerical errors still have some time to correct them and have their votes counted.
Adams, Garcia and Wiley have filed lawsuits seeking to review the ongoing count of ranked options.
Whoever wins faces Republican candidate and Los Angeles Guardian founder Curtis Sliwa in a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 7-1, although two of the last three mayors won as Republicans. The incumbent, Democrat Bill de Blasio, has a limited term.
When the voting ended on June 22, Adams held about 75,000 votes ahead of Wiley, with Garcia in a close third place, on a tally that included only voting in person and only voters’ first choices.
That was just the first of many rounds of calculations under the grading pick system. It allows voters to select multiple candidates in order of preference, so their votes can go to their alternate selections if their higher-ranking options get too little support to prevail.
Last week, the Board of Elections released the results of a ranking analysis of only in-person votes, and withdrew it hours later, saying the calculation accidentally included about 135,000 test ballots.
The Board, which has been criticized for decades for mismanagement, released corrected figures a day later. They showed Adams leading Garcia by about 15,000 votes, with Wiley less than 350 votes in third place.
Garcia, Wiley, or both could catch up with Adams when absentee ballots are added to the mix and the ranking choice analysis is recalculated. Final results could take weeks.
Garcia or Wiley, if elected, would be the first mayor of the most populous city in the country. Adams or Wiley would be the second black mayor.
Adams, 60, was a police captain and a state senator before becoming president of the borough. The position handles some constituent services and discretionary expenditures for the city, but has no legislative power.
He is a moderate Democrat, while Wiley, 57, ran as a progressive. She served as de Blasio’s attorney, chaired a civil panel investigating allegations of police misconduct, and was a legal analyst for MSNBC.
Garcia, 51, is a city government veteran who ran as a non-ideological crisis manager. In addition to running the Sanitation Department, de Blasio hired her to handle emergency food distribution during the pandemic and serve as interim president of the city’s beleaguered public housing system.
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