CITY ELEX IS FINALLY FINALIZED
Adams’ slim win confirmed
It’s official — finally.
The Board of Elections certified Eric Adams as the winner of the city’s Democratic mayoral primary race on Tuesday after a grueling, four-week wait that was made all the more stressful by a ballot tabulation error that has sparked calls for overhauling the embattled agency.
With all said and done, Adams, Brooklyn’s current borough president, clinched victory in the June 22 primary with a 7,197-ballot edge — or 0.8% of the vote total — over former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, according to certified tallies released by the Board of Elections.
That means Adams narrowly expanded his lead in the final count, having held a 7,153-vote lead in the last update released July 13, when a handful of provisional ballots were still outstanding.
“This is an historic moment for the working people of New York — and I am so proud of our campaign and what it has accomplished,” Adams said after the certification. “Now we must build on this movement to carry our campaign forward through the general election and on to City Hall so that we can deliver for everyday New Yorkers.”
Though the certification makes it official, Adams’ win has been in the bag for weeks, as Garcia and fellow mayoral hopeful Maya Wiley dropped out of the race July 7 after early results showed they no longer had paths to victory.
Adams, who’s vying to become the second Black mayor in the city’s history, will face off against Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in the Nov. 2 general election. In a city as deeply Democratic as New York, Adams is expected to breeze to victory in that contest.
Mayor de Blasio was barred from seeking reelection due to term limits.
In addition to the mayoral race, the Board of Elections on Tuesday certified the results of all the down-ballot elections that took place June 22 — except for the Republican primary for City Council District 50 on Staten Island and the Democratic primary for City Council District 9 in Harlem, both of which will undergo manual recounts because the top two candidates in each contest were within 0.5% of each other in the final tallies.
In the Staten Island race, Marko Kepi and David Carr are vying for the GOP nomination to replace term-limited Republican Councilman Steven Matteo.
In Harlem, left-wing primary challenger Kristin Richardson Jordan appears on track to oust Democratic Councilman Bill Perkins.
The June 22 primaries were the first in city history to use the ranked-choice voting system, in which losing candidates are eliminated and their supporters’ lower picks are transferred to remaining candidates until only two remain and a victor can be crowned.
The system is complicated and time-consuming, and the primaries were plunged into chaos on June 29, when the Board of Elections accidentally released early results that included 135,000 “test” ballots.
Since then, legislators in Albany have vowed to reform the board and blamed the city commissioners appointed by local political parties for the embarrassing ballot snafu.
During a brief certification ceremony at the board’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon, Tiffany Townsend, Manhattan’s Democratic Board of Elections commissioner, signaled that political patience for the agency is dwindling.
“It’s been a very, very challenging environment,” Townsend said.