Revised Ranked-Choice Vote Count After Debacle Shows Tight Race

NEW YORK CITY — A freshly redone preliminary count of ranked-choice voting in New York City's mayoral primary again shows a tight finish between Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia.

Adams finished at 51.1 percent to Garcia's 48.9 percent after nine rounds of ranked-choice voting, according to unofficial results released by the city's Board of Elections late Tuesday afternoon.

The results followed a massive debacle on Tuesday, in which board officials tallied 135,000 test votes with ballots counted that day. The "discrepancy" forced the board to scrap all the preliminary results released that day and plunged the Democratic mayoral primary into chaos.

BOE Commissioners apologized in a statement released with the updated tabulations.

"Yesterday's ranked choice voting reporting error was unacceptable and we apologize to the voters and to the campaigns for the confusion," they wrote. "Let us be clear: RCV was not the problem, rather a human error that could have been avoided.

"We have implemented another layer of review and quality control before publishing information going forward. We can say with certainty that the election night vote counts were and are accurate and the RCV data put out today is correct as well."

The corrected results show Adams, who won the most first-choice votes on June 22, narrowly besting Garcia by 14,755 votes.

The round nine results were:

• Eric Adams — 358,521 votes (51.1 percent)
• Kathryn Garcia — 343,766 votes (48.9 percent)

It's much closer result than the erroneous tally released Tuesday. Garcia, in a statement with a topical weather reference, declared the result a "dead heat."

"While we remain confident in our path to victory, we are taking nothing for granted and encourage everyone to patiently wait for over 124,000 absentee ballots to be counted and included in the ranked choice voting tabulation," she said.

Indeed, the results also indicate that roughly 124,000 absentee ballots set to be counted July 6 could give a third contender — Maya Wiley — a fighting chance.

Wiley was eliminated in eighth round after Garcia picked up votes from Andrew Yang voters, according to the results. And that margin was razor thin: just 347 votes.

The round eight results were:

• Eric Adams — 314,194 votes (40.9 percent)
• Kathryn Garcia — 226,922 votes (29.6 percent)
• Maya Wiley — 226,575 votes (29.5 percent)

All the results are preliminary and could significantly change when absentee ballots are counted July 6.

As with this failed-then-corrected count of ranked-choice votes, election officials on July 6 will tally voters' second- through fifth-choice preferences, eliminate candidates in successive rounds and allocate their votes to those who remained.

Adams' campaign released a statement predicting victory.

"Our campaign was the first choice of voters on Election Day and is leading this race by a significant margin because we put together a five-borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, more affordable place," the statement read. "There are still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric--and we are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied."

Final results could be finalized July 12.