Maloney, Torres win Dem noms

After six weeks of delays and fights over disputed ballots, City Council member Ritchie Torres and U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney have been certified as the winners of Democratic congressional primaries in New York City.

Vote tabulation in the June 23 primary stretched out over half the summer because of a record number of people who cast ballots by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic.

If he wins in the general election in November, Torres, who is Black and Latino, is likely to join Mondaire Jones, a lawyer who won the Democratic primary for a congressional seat in the suburbs north of New York City, as the first openly gay Black or Latino men in Congress.

Torres, 32, defeated 11 other candidates, beating his closest rival for the nomination by more than 8,000 votes.

Torres’ victory in a Bronx district that is one of the poorest congressional districts in the nation and Maloney’s in New York’s 12th Congressional District spanning parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens were certified by the city’s Board of Elections on Tuesday. The board did not immediately release vote totals that would have allowed The Associated Press to call the winner of either race.

The tallies in those contests were made available Wednesday. Maloney successfully defended her seat against challengers, including Suraj Patel.

In that race, a federal judge has ordered city elections officials to count more than 1,000 additional mail-in ballots that had initially been discarded because they lacked a postmark indicating what day they were sent.

Nevertheless, the elections board certified the race as complete Tuesday.

Patel, who was a plaintiff in the lawsuit demanding that some disqualified ballots be counted, said he is not conceding because the vote tally is not final. “The democratic process does not end when it becomes politically inconvenient,” Patel, a lawyer and activist, said Wednesday.

New York State decided to allow anyone to vote by mail in the June primary because of the coronavirus pandemic.