NEW YORK — Election day in the city’s Democratic mayoral race was nearly two weeks ago — and yet New Yorkers may have to hold their breaths for another two weeks before a winner is crowned.
A number of factors are contributing to the long wait, primarily the ranked-choice voting system that’s being used for the first time in Big Apple history in this election cycle. A catastrophic tabulation error by the Board of Elections — whereby preliminary results had to be thrown out after 135,000 dummy ballots were accidentally included in the count — also didn’t help soothe the electoral anxiety.
But with the BOE’s ballot bungle corrected and placed in the rearview, the focus of the mayoral contest is shifting to a subset of votes that will all but certainly determine the winner: Mail-in absentee ballots.
According to BOE tallies, 125,709 absentees have been returned in the June 22 primary and are in the process of being counted.
That’s a highly significant number for a race that Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is currently leading by just 14,755 votes over runner-up candidate Kathryn Garcia, the city’s former sanitation commissioner.
As if that’s not intriguing enough, Maya Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor Bill de Blasio, is also still in the mix, having been eliminated after trailing Garcia by just 347 votes in the final ranked-choice tabulation round of in-person ballots, meaning she could still have a shot once absentees are counted.
The thin margins — coupled with sparse polling and the unpredictability of the ranked-choice system — are making it nearly impossible to make confident predictions, according to election experts.
“It’ll be pretty close either way and either candidate could win,” tweeted Ryan Matsumoto, an analyst with Inside Elections, a nonpartisan group.
The BOE, which has kept conspicuously silent since apologizing for its balloting snafu on Tuesday, says it started counting absentees this past Monday, with plans to include at least some of them in an updated ranked-choice tally on Tuesday.
Absentees are counted in the same way as in-person votes, with the BOE first sifting through the top picks on ballots and then moving on to eliminating losing candidates and disseminating their supporters’ lower-ranked choices across the field.
While a clearer picture could emerge from the Tuesday ballot dump, the BOE will still have ways to go after that.
Official results — including all absentees as well as affidavit ballots cast in-person but subject to extra review because of registration issues at the polls — aren’t expected until the week of July 12, according to the BOE.
Throwing another potential wrench into the electoral quagmire, Adams, Garcia and Wiley have all filed court papers reserving their rights to demand full or partial recounts of the results.
Wiley, who submitted her papers in Brooklyn Supreme Court just ahead of a Friday afternoon deadline, said her complaint safeguards her ability “to correct errors that have occurred, are occurring, or may occur.”
As it relates to the absentee process, all three candidates are confident the outstanding votes provide them with paths to victory.
The Adams and Garcia campaigns have released memos making cases for why the roughly 125,000 absentees are likely to break for them.
In the Garcia camp’s view, the absentees are likely to favor her because a majority of them were cast by voters registered in Manhattan, where the ex-sanitation commissioner saw a surge of support on primary day.
But the Adams memo counters that his in-person ballot edge, while slim, is sizable enough for him to keep Garcia at arm’s length.
Wiley has not had her campaign released a memo. Nonetheless, she also maintains she has a real shot at becoming mayor.
“It is a wide-open race,” Wiley said in a news conference outside City Hall on Thursday. “We’ve known it was a wide-open race since primary day, and it remains a deeply competitive race.”
