NEW YORK — The Democratic mayoral campaign of frontrunner Eric Adams Wednesday filed a lawsuit seeking to have a judge oversee the botched vote count in the convoluted race.
“We petitioned the court to preserve our right to a fair election process and to have a judge oversee and review ballots, if necessary,” the Adams campaign said in a statement.
The Adams campaign urged other campaigns to join the suit, suggesting they share a common interest in having a judge oversee the count by the troubled city Board of Elections.
“We all seek a clear and trusted conclusion to this election,” the Adams campaign said.
The suit is the first one filed since the city Board of Elections released a botched simulation of how ranked-choice voting would play out after the initial count of early and election day in-person votes.
The board inadvertently added some 135,000 dummy ballots to the count, rendering the simulation useless and possibly misleading.
The now-discredited new count showed the race tightening dramatically with Adams’ once-robust lead shrinking to just about 2% over Kathryn Garcia, who leapfrogged Maya Wiley into second place. It’s not clear if the same pattern will be true when the board redoes the simulation without the dummy ballots.
About 130,000 mail-in ballots remain uncounted altogether. They were required to be returned to elections officials by Tuesday, but the board says it will not tabulate them until next week, without offering a reason for the long delay.
Andrew Yang, who finished fourth in the initial camp, had already filed a suit asking for judicial oversight over the vote count.
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