NYC Board of Elections to release latest primary vote tallies that will determine key city races

NEW YORK — The election cycle that never seems to end is about to draw to a close — hopefully.

After two weeks of uncertainty and vote-counting errors, the city’s embattled Board of Elections is expected to release the results of a tranche of absentee ballots on Tuesday that will all but certainly determine the winner of the Democratic mayoral race and several other key local primaries.

According to Board of Elections tallies, 131,620 absentee ballots were returned by mail on time to be tabulated in the June 22 elections, the first mayoral primary in New York City history to use the somewhat confusing ranked-choice voting system.

An overwhelming number of the outstanding absentee ballots — 125,794, to be precise — were cast by registered Democrats, whose voices hold outsized power in deciding the heated mayoral primary due to the razor-thin electoral margins established by the count of all in-person votes.

The in-person tally currently has Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams at the head of the sprawling mayoral primary pack.

But Kathryn Garcia, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s former sanitation commissioner, trails Adams by a measly 14,755 ballots in the in-person count, meaning the race could flip on its head once the absentees are entered into the mix.

Adding another wrinkle, Maya Wiley, de Blasio’s former counsel, is clinging on to hope that the absentee ballots could carry her to victory in the mayoral showdown, having been eliminated in the in-person count’s final ranked-choice round after placing behind Garcia by just 347 votes.

That’s all to say that Tuesday’s release of in-person and absentee ballots should give New Yorkers a pretty good idea as to who won the Democratic primary and then all eyes on the general election in November.

The absentee ballot dump is expected “mid-afternoon” Tuesday, according to a Board of Elections spokeswoman.

The spokeswoman was not able to say whether all 125,794 Democratic ballots returned in the June 22 primaries will be reflected in the updated results. However, election workers have been counting absentees since last Monday, and the board previously said the Tuesday release should include most, if not all, of them.

Like in-person ballots, the absentee votes will go through the ranked-choice process.

The process consists of the lowest-polling candidate being eliminated one round at a time and having his or her supporters’ ranked choices reallocated to the rest of the field. Elimination rounds continue until a winner is crowned.

Before Tuesday’s absentee drop, the board’s commissioners will meet for their weekly conference at 1:30 p.m.

The meeting, which will be livestreamed, is likely to feature apologies from the commissioners over last week’s disastrous tabulation snafu, in which 135,000 fake “test” ballots were accidentally included in the public count. The ballot bungle is likely to be a topic of heated debate well beyond this election cycle, with legislators in Albany calling for the Board of Elections to be drastically overhauled over the embarrassing error.

All three remaining mayoral candidates have expressed varying degrees of confidence that the absentees will favor their campaigns.

Garcia has taken particular stock in absentee returns showing that nearly 40,000 of the outstanding ballots were cast by voters registered in Manhattan, where she outperformed Adams by hefty margins on Election Day.

According to a memo released Monday by Garcia pollster Adam Rosenblatt, the former sanitation commissioner is also set to benefit from thousands of more absentee ballots cast by voters registered in diverse parts of Brooklyn and Queens, where she pulled off a similarly strong in-person showing once ranked choices came into play.

“The geographic distribution of the returned absentee ballots favors Garcia and puts Adams at a disadvantage compared to his in-person vote standing,” Rosenblatt said.

Rosenblatt’s optimism aside, Garcia would need to hold off Wiley and beat Adams in the ranked-choice votes of the absentee ballots by a margin of around 57% to 43% to overtake him.

In its own memo, the Adams campaign said its absentee analysis shows Garcia is unlikely to pull that off.

Whoever wins the Democratic mayoral primary will square off against longshot Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa in November.

After Tuesday’s absentee action, the board will give voters until Friday to “cure” any ballots that were incorrectly filled out or deemed invalid for some other reason. The board then plans to finalize the results from all primaries at some point next week.

Though most of the focus has been on the race to replace de Blasio, Tuesday’s absentee results are also likely to determine winners in the primary races for comptroller and all five borough presidents.

The comptroller contest may be the most nail-biting down-ballot primary, with progressive Brooklyn Councilman currently leading Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, by roughly 21,000 votes.

Another race that’s likely to be finalized from Tuesday’s update is the Democratic Manhattan district attorney primary, which was not decided by ranked-choice voting.

Alvin Bragg, a former state prosecutor, declared victory in the DA primary last week after his main rival, Tali Farhadian Weinstein, conceded the race. The Tuesday absentee release will, however, officially seal the deal for the Democratic candidate who will face the Republican nominee Thomas Kenniff on Nov. 2.

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