New York, NY Mayor: After an extraordinary debacle on Tuesday that involved the release and retraction of election results that mistakenly included test votes, the New York City Board of Elections published a new tabulation of the ranked-choice votes in last week's Democratic primary on Wednesday, showing Eric Adams clinging to a narrow 51-49 edge over Kathryn Garcia in the ninth and final round.
That's a considerable collapse compared to Adams' standing among first-choice voters, who currently give him a 32-22 lead over Maya Wiley. But crucially, none these tallies include any of the 125,000 absentee ballots that were returned by Tuesday's deadline, nor an unknown number of provisional ballots. Officials will not start counting absentees until next week, and it could be some time before final results are known.
Those mail-in votes could prove decisive, and they're likely to favor Garcia: The largest share—32%—were cast in Manhattan, Garcia's best borough with early and Election Day voters in terms of first-choice votes. (By contrast, about 28% of in-person votes were cast in Manhattan.) They could also completely reshape the last round of the race, because at the end of the eighth round, Garcia leads Wiley by just 347 votes, meaning that Wiley could very well end up as one of the two finalists.
(If the latest figures are giving you a sense of déjà vu, they ought to: Tuesday's run also showed Adams edging out Garcia 51-49 in the last round—albeit the 11th round rather than the ninth—despite the inclusion of some 135,000 test votes that hadn't been wiped from the city's election management system.)
Prior to the election, the board had said the first absentee ballots would show up in the tallies starting on July 6, but "more complete" results won't appear until the following week, and officials have not said when they expect to finish. Following last year's primaries, it took six weeks for some races to be certified, though there were more than three times as many absentee ballots to count compared to this year. The board has also said it will release new ranked-choice tabulations every Tuesday, though it's not clear whether this schedule has changed as a result of this week's fiasco.