NYC Mayoral Primary Results Could Be Delayed By Ranked-Choice

NEW YORK CITY — Ranked-choice voting threatens to be a wildcard as New York City's hotly contested mayoral primary enters its final hours.

After polls close at 9 p.m. Tuesday it could take days or even weeks for a clear winner to emerge, Mayor Bill de Blasio warned voters.

“We all have to get used to the idea it could be weeks before we have a 100 percent final count,” he said Monday.

“This will be different, this will be a frustrating process and it’ll take a while,” he continued.

Ranked-choice voting gives New Yorkers a chance to pick and rank up to five candidates by order of preference in the mayoral race, as well as other contested races with more than two candidates.

Unless one of the 13 Democratic mayoral hopefuls grabs a clear 50 percent of first-rank voters, then it's likely going to take time to determine a clear winner.

The process requires a different way of obtaining results from the city's Board of Elections and could require patience, said Matthew Sollars, a spokesperson for the New York City Campaign Finance Board.

"With Ranked Choice Voting, we will be getting our results from the Board of Elections in a new way," Sollars said in a statement. "This will take cooperation from everyone involved, including the media and candidates, to respect the counting process and to accurately reflect the unofficial nature of vote tallies until the BOE declares an official winner.

The crowded Democratic mayoral primary's final days also yielded a controversy about the ranked-choice process, which can benefit candidates who cross-endorse each other on the ballots.

One such last-minute alliance by Democratic candidates Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang over the weekend drew harsh words from fellow mayoral hopeful Eric Adams.

Adams said Yang's recommendation to rank Yang and Garcia as numbers 1 and 2 on ranked-choice ballots amounted to an attempt to block a person of color — Adams — from becoming mayor, as reported by the New York Times.

The racially charged accusation quickly drew pushback, including from fellow mayoral candidate Maya Wiley, who argued Garcia and Yang's alliance is not racist.

"Ranked Choice Voting - or alliances formed from it - is not voter suppression, it's not a poll tax and to compare it to that denigrates the work of so many who have come before us," she wrote in a statement. "We cheapen their sacrifices when we make these claims that are meant to perniciously cast doubt on the outcome of this election."

De Blasio has avoided naming his preference in the mayoral race, but is rumored to secretly back Adams, according to the New York Times. When asked Monday about comments by Adams and Adams's surrogates that appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy of ranked-choice voting, de Blasio dodged addressing them.

"So, again, I'm going to keep my focus on urging everyone to vote and to rank five candidates for every office," he said.

Here's how the vote counting process will unfold on Tuesday.

After polls close at 9 p.m., the city's Board of Elections plans to release data on where the vote count stands based only on people's first choices, and only for votes cast in person, the Associated Press reported.

Then on June 29, the board will run its first ranked choice analysis, using only votes cast in person, showing who the winner and runner-up would be if no votes had been cast by mail.

Finally, on July 6, the board will run another ranked-choice analysis that includes all absentee ballots processed to that point. If there are still uncounted or disputed ballots, the process will be run yet again on July 12, the day the Board of Elections is anticipated to release and certify final results, according to the campaign finance board.