Revised vote count shows Adams ahead in NYC mayoral primary

Revised vote counts in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary show Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams maintaining a thin lead, a day after a first attempt to report the results of a ranked choice voting analysis went disastrously wrong.

The mayor’s race, part the first city election to use ranked choice voting, was thrown into disarray Tuesday after the city’s Board of Elections posted incorrect preliminary vote counts and then withdrew them hours later.

Corrected numbers released Wednesday showed Adams, a former police captain and state senator, leading former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by 14,755 votes. Civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley was practically tied with Garcia, falling just 347 votes behind in the ranked choice analysis. It essentially allows some candidates to pick up votes from voters whose first choices get eliminated for lack of support.

The corrected results still don’t paint a complete picture of the race. Nearly 125,000 absentee ballots have yet to be counted.

Adams’ thin lead means it is possible for Garcia or Wiley to catch up when absentee ballots are added to the mix starting on July 6. Final results in the primary could be weeks away.

Adams’ advantage narrowed substantially from an election-night count that involved only voters’ first choices. Still, his campaign called the lead “significant.”

“We are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied,” the campaign added.

Garcia said she, too, remained “confident in our path to victory” but wasn’t taking it for granted. Wiley, meanwhile, called the race “still wide open.”

“Following yesterday’s embarrassing debacle, the Board of Elections must count every vote in an open way so that New Yorkers can have confidence that their votes are being counted accurately,” she tweeted.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3dxB6Et