By Joseph Ax
(Reuters) – New York City’s Board of Elections is expected to release updated vote totals in the Democratic mayoral contest on Wednesday, a day after the board threw the race into confusion when it erroneously tabulated 135,000 test ballots.
The results that appeared on the board’s website on Tuesday indicated that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams’s lead over his two nearest rivals, former city sanitation chief Kathryn Garcia and former civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley, had shrunk considerably.
But the board later removed the figures after the Adams campaign and journalists pointed out that the total number of ballots counted was approximately 140,000 higher than it had been on the night of the June 22 election.
The snafu was the latest in a long series of problems for the board, whose reputation for dysfunction has drawn repeated criticism from candidates and analysts. Last year, for instance, it took officials six weeks to count the votes in two hotly contested congressional races.
This week’s error could also undermine public confidence in the new ranked-choice voting system being used for the first time by the United States’ most populous city in a mayoral race, allowing voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference.
Wednesday’s results will be the first analysis of voters’ second, third, fourth and fifth choices. But they will not include some 125,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted, which could alter the results. Election officials have said they expect to release the final tallies by mid-July.
Preliminary totals released on election night showed Adams with 31.7% of first-choice ballots among voters who cast them in person. Wiley was in second place with 22.2%, with Garcia just behind at 19.5%.
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate, finished in fourth place and conceded that night.
The winner of the Democratic primary election will be heavily favored against the Republican nominee, Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels civilian patrol group. The city’s next mayor will confront a nascent recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and a rise in violent crime.
Adams, 60, is a former police captain whose candidacy was boosted as public safety became voters’ No. 1 issue amid a spate of shootings. He called for increased police resources, while also vowing to address systemic racial bias.
Garcia, a government veteran, ran as a technocrat who could best manage the city’s crises. Wiley, a former MSNBC analyst, emerged as the leading liberal candidate and proposed cutting one-sixth of the police budget to fund social services.
The race – taking place in a city of 8 million – had been widely seen as a crucial test of ranked-choice voting, or RCV, which has been used in a handful of U.S. elections. Proponents of the system say it allows voters to choose the candidates they like best, without fear their votes will be wasted.
In a statement late on Tuesday, Susan Lerner, the executive director of the good government group Common Cause New York and a supporter of RCV, said the error had nothing to do with the system itself.
RCV operates as a series of instant runoffs: If no candidate has a majority, the candidate in last place is eliminated, and his or her votes are redistributed to the voters’ second choice. That process repeats until there are only two candidates left, and the one with more than 50% is declared the winner.
Republican former President Donald Trump seized on the board’s error on Wednesday to assert in a statement that the election was irreversibly tainted, echoing his false claims that his own loss in last year’s presidential election was the result of massive irregularities.
The leading candidates expressed varying levels of frustration, with Adams calling the board’s mistake “unfortunate” and Wiley blasting the board for “generations of failures.”
In 2016, the board came under fire for mistakenly purging tens of thousands of eligible voters from voter rolls. In 2018, voters waited for hours in lines to cast ballots as a result of malfunctioning machines.
Last year, amid the pandemic, the board printed the wrong voters’ names on some envelopes and sent many absentee ballots too late to be used.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Jonathan Oatis)
