New York City will be one step closer to figuring out who the next mayor is when the Board of Elections announces the ranked-choice tally of ballots on Tuesday.
The announcement is still not the final say, as about 124,000 absentee ballots are yet to be counted, but it could solidify Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams’ lead and demonstrate the strength of his coalition for the Democratic nomination. The results will give voters a sense of who would have won the election if absentee ballots weren’t factored in.
In the first results released on Election Day, June 22, Adams led with about 31%, followed by civil rights lawyer Maya Wiley with 22% and former city Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia with about 19.5%.
The fourth candidate in line, former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, conceded last Tuesday when he received 11.7% of the vote, but he may have aided Garcia in the last days of the race by campaigning with her and asking his supporters to list her as a second-choice on their ballots.
The outstanding absentee ballots, which won’t be counted until July 6, are likely to favor Adams: 44% came from state Assembly districts where he led in the early and election-day voting, compared to 32% from Garcia-led districts and 14% where Wiley leads.
On Tuesday, the Board of Elections is scheduled to release the early voting and Election Day results of the rounds of ranked-choice voting, which the city is using for the first time in race as big as the mayor’s election and which makes declaring a winner complicated.
Under the system, voters can rank their top five preferences, with the Board of Elections eliminating the last-place candidate and transferring those votes round-by-round until two candidates remain. Tuesday’s release will reveal the support of the candidates after the ranked-choice rounds but before the absentee ballots are factored in. Then on July 6, the city will release the results of the absentee ballots. Whichever candidate has the most votes in the last round, once all the votes are counted, is the winner.
Coming out of the Election Day tally, Adams holds a 75,512 vote edge over Wiley, and a 97,422 vote lead over Garcia. FairVote -- the ranked-choice advocacy organization that pushed for the new system and accurately predicted Adams’ election-day lead -- ran a ranked-choice voting simulation that forecast Adams would win in a final round of ranked-choice voting with 56.7% of the vote.
Wiley and Garcia have each said they intend to remain in the race until the calculations are complete. The latest that would be is July 12, city officials have said.
“Adams has a substantial but not unsurmountable lead, but Garcia and Wiley have a slim shot,” said Democratic political consultant George Arzt.
The winner will face Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa in the November election, but is heavily favored to win in the overwhelmingly Democratic city.
Adams, a Black former New York Police Department captain, built strong support across the city by campaigning as a law-and-order candidate who had also survived a police beating as a teen arrested for criminal trespassing. He opposed calls to cut police budget funding and advocated the return of some form of stop-and-frisk as well as a plainclothes anti-crime task force, both of which were accused of disproportionately targeting men of color.
In early voting and on Election Day, Adams carried Republican-heavy Staten Island as well as the outer boroughs of Brooklyn and the Bronx as the city endures a sharp rise in shootings and a doubling of hate crimes in the last year.
Wiley, a former counsel to term-limited Mayor Bill de Blasio, received national support from progressive figures eager for a win at the ballot box. But she took criticism for paying for a private security force in her neighborhood, while calling for police budget cuts.
Garcia was seen as a competent manager with city experience and did well among voters eager to see a non-ideological candidate elected mayor of the U.S.’s most populous city.
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