SORRY, NOT SO FAST!
Primary Day is Tuesday, but final results may not come until mid-July
New York City’s Democratic mayoral race may have one final, flummoxing twist after Primary Day on Tuesday.
Voters could be facing a lengthy wait — perhaps until the middle of July — to learn who won the primary, the potential byproduct of a new voting system and an uptick in absentee ballot requests because of the pandemic.
For the first time, the city is using ranked-choice voting: The method allows voters to rank their top five picks and counts secondary preferences if no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes.
Once the polls are closed, the Board of Elections is expected to release unofficial results for first-choice selections, a data dump that could reveal the likely winner. Or maybe not.
Those results won’t include absentee ballots — more than 218,000 have already been sent out, according to the Board of Elections — and they won’t factor in ranked-choice elimination rounds that will follow if no candidate in the crowded Democratic primary wins a majority of first-choice votes.
When the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is knocked out, voters who selected him or her as their top choice have their second-choice votes distributed to the remaining contenders. The process repeats until only two candidates remain. At that point, the hopeful with more votes wins.
Although an unofficial victor could still emerge on Primary Day, perhaps by hauling in more than 40% of the first-place vote, that appears unlikely. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, the perceived front-runner, has led recent surveys with about 25% of first-choice support.
Sid Davidoff, who has advised several mayors and toiled in city politics since the 1960s, said he would be shocked if a clear winner emerges Tuesday, and that election watchers remain deeply uncertain about how ranked-choice will influence the results.
“It’s something that none of us who’ve been watching this stuff for years know anything about,” Davidoff said. “What we do feel, at least from my point of view and those I’ve spoken to, is that Election Night we will not see a clear winner.”
Absentee ballots can continue to stream in until June 29, a week after they must be postmarked, and a final official count won’t start until July 12, according to the Board of Elections. The scheduling gaps will allow for the return of absentee ballots so voters who made technical errors can correct them.
The Democratic primary is widely expected to determine the next mayor, and some candidates have pointedly criticized the city for its handling of the voting process.
Shaun Donovan, the former federal housing secretary, questioned efforts to build the voting system and to ensure a quick return of results. “We should have
them right away,” he said after he cast his own ballot during the early voting period.
Adams has likewise lamented the anticipated wait, and has linked it to what he’s described as an insufficient voter education process for the rankedchoice method.
Critics have worried for months that voters would not fully understand the process.
“We don’t know how long this is going to take,” Adams said in Manhattan this month. “I’m really troubled about the outcome of this. I hope the counting does not equal the rollout.”
His opponent Andrew Yang also expressed concern.
“The last thing New York City needs is some kind of replay of what happened at a national level when you had a disputed election,” Yang, a one-time presidential candidate, said at a campaign stop in Brooklyn.
At the same time, several hopefuls have projected confidence in the process — if not in its speed.
Kathryn Garcia, the former city sanitation commissioner, recently shrugged off a question about election lawyers, saying that her campaign does not anticipate “anything bad is going to happen.”
Maya Wiley, ex-counsel to Mayor de Blasio, batted back a question about potential false claims of victory, noting after she cast her ballot that the “only thing that counts is the people of New York, so we will wait until there’s a final count.”
And Ray McGuire, a former Citigroup executive, said, “We have to trust the process.” Still, he noted that his campaign will have “appropriate infrastructure” in place to ensure that “the process is as transparent and as viable as New Yorkers expect for it to be.”
Dianne Morales, the former nonprofit executive who is vying for the progressive vote with Wiley and city Comptroller Scott Stringer, said this month that she hopes some clarity emerges in the postelection haze.
“We’ll have a sense of who’s out sooner ... as the votes get tallied,” Morales said. “In terms of the actual winner — I think that could take a good while.”