NYC mayoral favorite Eric Adams maintains 'thin lead' over rivals Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley after election board counting fiasco saw 135,000 test ballots accidentally added to primary totals
New York Mayoral frontrunner Eric Adams has retained a narrow margin over rivals Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley - hours after election officials admitted they'd accidentally added 135,000 test ballots to the total.
Corrected figures released on Friday showed Adams, a former NYPD captain, was just 14,755 votes ahead of his closest rival Kathryn Garcia in the primary run-off.
Those numbers also put left-wing candidate Maya Wiley back in the running, after they showed that she sat just 347 votes behind Garcia.
PIX11 reported that Garcia is in a better position than Wiley was after picking up votes from former favorite Andrew Yang, who has since withdrawn from the campaign.
Almost 125,000 absentee ballots have yet to be counted, meaning that Garcia or Wiley could both catch up with Adams. Those ballots will be counted from July 6, with the final primary result likely to be weeks away.
The largest chunk of those uncounted votes - around 39,000 - come from Manhattan, where Adams finished third on the first ballot behind Garcia and Wiley, potentially spelling further trouble for his campaign.
Adams campaign insisted Wednesday that he still had a 'significant lead' over his rivals.
Eric Adams, pictured on June 22, retains a 14,755 vote lead over Kathryn Garcia, according to newly-corrected vote tolls
Garcia, pictured center, now sits just 347 votes ahead of progressive rival Maya Wiley
Maya Wiley's campaign appeared to be over earlier this week. But Wednesday's updated count puts her firmly back in the race, with 125,000 ballots still to
'We are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied,' the campaign added.
The ex-NYPD cop has run a markedly less progressive campaign than his rivals. He opposes defunding the police, and wants to bring back the controversial 'stop and frisk' policy.
By contrast, Wiley wants to slash $1 billion from the NYPD budget, and Garcia wants to raise the minimum age people can become a cop from 21 to 25.
Garcia, the city's former sanitation commissioner, 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.
The Board of Elections apologized for Tuesday's mistake, which involved the accidental inclusion of 135,000 test ballot images in the vote totals.
Wednesday's revised results included about 17,000 more votes than the election-night total, but the board said that was because a small percentage of precincts weren't yet counted on election night.
The board insisted the new counts were accurate and said it was now doing more checks and reviews before releasing more data.
They have not indicated any plans to re-run the primary run-off, although the error will likely result in lawsuits should the final result be close.
'We will do so with a heightened sense that we must regain the trust of New Yorkers,' board President Frederic Umane and Secretary Miguelina Camilo said in a statement.
Still, critics said the mishap proved that the board was not equipped to handle the new ranked choice system.
Mayor Bill de Blasio called for 'a complete structural rebuild' of the board, which operates independently of his office. The City Council´s black, Latino and Asian Caucus - whose leaders favor putting a repeal of ranked choice voting on the November ballot - noted that its members had warned that the city wasn't ready for the new system.
'The concerns they raised continue to be borne out by the facts,' the group said in a statement.
Before the new counts were released Wednesday, Adams filed a lawsuit seeking to preserve the ballots and voting machines to ensure an accurate count.
The board declined to comment on the suit.
Garcia's campaign said it would pursue the necessary legal steps to ensure that ranked choice votes 'are fully and accurately counted.' The Wiley campaign had no immediate comment.
Adams, Garcia and Wiley all blasted the counting cock-up on Wednesday night.
Adams said: 'Today's mistake by the Board of Elections was unfortunate.
'It is critical that New Yorkers are confident in their electoral system, especially as we rank votes in a citywide election for the first time.'
FILE - Frederic Umane, President of the New York City Board of Elections, addresses poll workers at Frank McCourt High School, Tuesday, June 22, 2021, in New York. New York City's first mayoral contest using ranked choice voting has been thrown into chaos after city election officials posted incorrect preliminary vote counts in the Democratic primary and then withdrew them. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
His main rival, Garcia, said it was 'deeply troubling and requires a much more transparent and complete explanation.'
Wiley said that it was 'the result of generations of failures that have gone unaddressed.'
She said it was 'impossible to be surprised' at the chaos, and demanded reform of the Board of Elections.
'Today, we have once again seen the mismanagement that has resulted in a lack of confidence in results, not because there is a flaw in our election laws, but because those who implement it have failed too many times,' she said.
New York City adopted ranked choice voting for primaries and special elections in a 2019 referendum and used the system in citywide races for the first time in the June 22 primary.
Under the system, voters could rank up to five candidates in order of preference.
Since no candidate was the first choice of more than 50 per cent of voters, a computer on Tuesday tabulated ballots in a series of rounds that worked like instant run-offs.
In each round, the candidate in last place is eliminated. Votes cast for that person are then redistributed to the surviving candidates, based on whoever voters put next on their ranking list. That process repeats until only two candidates are left.
Adams´ lead shrank significantly in Wednesday's figures because he didn't do nearly as well as Garcia among voters whose first choices were Wiley or 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang, the other top candidates.
Garcia and Yang campaigned together, and she was the top alternative pick among his supporters. A little more than half of Wiley´s backers went to Garcia as an alternate choice, while only 20% supported Adams.
In all, more than 117,000 voters didn´t rank either Adams or Garcia anywhere on their ballots. That´s 14% of the votes counted so far.
Versions of the ranked choice system have been used in U.S. cities including San Francisco and Minneapolis for years and in statewide races in Maine.
Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, which promoted adoption of the ranked choice system, noted that Tuesday's discrepancy was due to human error, not a defect inherent in ranked choice voting itself.
Rob Richie, the president and CEO of FairVote, a nonprofit that advocates for ranked choice voting, said he did not believe Tuesday's flub would have a lasting impact on New Yorkers' faith in the ranked choice system.
'This certainly, fundamentally, is not anything about ranked choice voting, and it certainly is about the historic challenges that the Board of Elections has faced,' Richie said.
The winner of New York City's mayoral primary will be the heavy favorite in the general election against Curtis Sliwa, the Republican founder of the Guardian Angels.
Sliwa and his as-yet-unconfirmed rival will face off in a general election scheduled for November 2.
FILE - In this Tuesday June 22, 2021, file photo, Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams address supporters at his primary election night party in New York. Adams holds a lead in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, but with hundreds of thousands of votes set to be redistributed in a new ranked choice voting system, it remained possible for opponents Maya Wiley or Kathryn Garcia to come out on top. (AP Photo/Kevin Hagen, File).
FILE - In this Tuesday, June 22, 2021, file photo, Democrat mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia, center, posing for photos as she campaigns on New York's Upper West Side. Eric Adams holds a lead in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, but with hundreds of thousands of votes set to be redistributed in a new ranked choice voting system, it remained possible for opponents Garcia or Maya Wiley to come out on top. (AP Photo/Richard Drew, File)
FILE - In this Tuesday June 22, 2021, file photo, Democratic mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, center, as she greet voters during a campaign stop in the West Village neighborhood of New York. Eric Adams holds a lead in New York City's Democratic mayoral primary, but with hundreds of thousands of votes set to be redistributed in a new ranked choice voting system, it remained possible for opponents Wiley or Kathryn Garcia to come out on top. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)
Results from the New York mayoral primary after the first round of ranked choice tabulation. (AP Graphic)