Democratic Mayoral Primary Now a Close Race Between Only Adams and Garcia

By Yehudit Garmaise

     Eric Adams showed a 9% lead on Election Night over Maya Wiley, who has now been eliminated, but now that the Board of Elections (BOE) has counted 800,000 ballots and tallied New Yorkers' second through fifth place choices, Adams is now edging out runner-up Katherine Garcia by only 2% of the vote.

     Rank-choice voting has eliminated the other 11 Democratic mayoral candidates: leaving standing only Adams, who is Brooklyn's borough president and who currently has 51.1% of the vote, and Garcia, the city's former sanitation commissioner, who is following closely behind with 48.9% of New Yorkers’ votes.

     In New York City’s new ranked-choice voting system, after the election, the candidate with the least first-choice votes is eliminated, and that candidate’s votes are then reallocated to the candidates whom his or her voters ranked as their second choices.     

     Then, the cycle continues to winnow down the candidates by continuing the process of eliminating the candidate who falls into last place and then reallocating his or her votes, until only the top two candidates remain.

     The winner of the Democratic mayoral primary will be determined by the tallies of the 124,000 absentee and affidavit ballots that state law allowed the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) to start to count only yesterday.

     Yesterday, a Republican and Democrat kept careful watch as BOE workers fed absentee ballots to be scanned into the city’s computer system. 

system.  

     Today is the final deadline for absentee ballots to trickle into the BOE to be counted.

     One July 6, the BOE will announce results that include both the second ranked-choices and the absentee ballots, however, the official and certified results will not be announced until July 12.