Democrat mayoral candidates Maya Wiley, Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia have all filed lawsuits regarding the June 22 primary election and are seeking to review the city’s first-ever ranked vote tallies.
''This is a wide-open race and, as is standard procedure, my campaign filed a petition to preserve the right to challenge the results should we believe it is necessary,'' Wiley said in a statement to The Associated Press Friday.
Wiley filed her suit in a Brooklyn state court Thursday, following Adams and Garcia, who filed their respective suits Wednesday.
The most recent balloting currently has Adams leading Garcia by about 14,000 votes with Wiley coming in third by just 347 votes, according to the story.
Questions regarding the election arose this week after the city’s Board of Elections announced that initial tallies included approximately 135,000 or so test votes that were reportedly discovered and removed from the totals.
''Yesterday's ranked choice voting reporting error was unacceptable, and we apologize to the voters and to the campaigns for the confusion," the Board of Elections commissioners said in the statement. "Let us be clear: Ranked Choice Voting was not the problem, rather a human error that could have been avoided. We have implemented another layer of review and quality control before publishing information going forward."
Another 125,000 absentee votes in the race are not scheduled to be included until Tuesday, which could dramatically change the nature of the race.
Despite losing ground after the 135,000 test votes were removed, Adams said he is confident he will win.
"Our campaign was the first choice of voters on Election Day and is leading this race by a significant margin because we put together a five-borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, more affordable place," the Adams campaign said. "There are still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric — and we are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied."
Under ranked choice voting, voters choose several candidates in their order of preference.
If one candidate gets a majority of votes — more than 50% — in the first round, that person wins.
If no candidate reaches the 50% mark, the candidates with the lowest vote totals are eliminated and their votes redistributed to the candidates still in contention based on the rank given them by that voter.
The process continues until one candidate emerges with a majority, or a runoff election is held if no candidate reaches a majority.
The 13 other candidates did not get enough votes to move to the next round of voting, and their votes were re-distributed to the top candidates.
The winner will face Republican Curtis Sliwa, who founded the iconic Guardian Angels.