'Discrepancy' Leaves NYC Mayoral Primary Vote In Chaos

NEW YORK CITY – A "discrepancy" in a round of ranked-choice votes released Tuesday has left the New York City's Democratic mayoral primary race in disarray.

The city’s Board of Elections, after topsy-turvy day that potentially shook up the mayor’s race, withdrew ranked-choice results and announced about 135,000 test ballots were included in the tally.

Staff removed the test ballots from their system and will upload June 22 election night results, the BOE tweeted.

“The cast vote record will be re-generated and the RCV rounds will be re-tabulated,” the tweet states.

The massive do-over casts doubt over the day’s results, which appeared to leave Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia the two remaining contenders, with Adams narrowly in the lead.

Those results stood for hours until the city's Board of Elections issued a statement.

"We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report," the BOE tweeted. "We are working with our RCV technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred."

The Board of Elections then wiped out all previously released ranked-choice voting results on its website and replaced them with message promising results on Wednesday.

The race as it last stood before Tuesday showed Adams with a wide lead on first-choice votes at 31.66 percent, followed by Maya Wiley at 22.22 and Garcia at 19.48 percent.

Tuesday's release was the first count of ranked-choice votes, which tallied voters' second-through- fifth-choice preferences and conducted rounds of ranked-choice voting, eliminating candidates and allocating their votes to those who remained.

The preliminary, since-retracted, results on Tuesday went through 11 rounds of votes and left only two candidates:

• Adams — 368,898 (51.1 percent)
• Garcia — 352,990 (48.9 percent)

But Adams eventually questioned an apparent difference in vote totals between the primary on June 22 and those counted on Tuesday. The discrepancy was more than 100,000 votes, he said.

“We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities,” he said in a statement. “We remain confident that Eric Adams will be the next mayor of New York.”

The withdrawal prompted renewed questions over the Board of Elections' competence.

Assuming the "discrepancy" is sorted, the Board of Elections is next scheduled to repeat the ranked-choice voting process July 6 with the remaining 125,000 absentee ballots.

Final results were expected to be released July 12.