You may get some deja vu with the news about what just happened in the saga of the NYC mayoral election today.
The election was actually last Tuesday. But they’re still counting and don’t expect to be done until sometime in July.
Brooklyn Borough President and former police officer Eric Adams had been the surprise leader in the race when he came in first place last Tuesday, with 82 percent of the results in. That didn’t make some on the left happy, although he was still a Democrat. The election has ranked-choice voting and he was the first choice of 31.6 percent of the people whose votes had been counted to that point, with Maya Wiley second with 22.3% and Kathryn Garcia third with 19.7%.
But whoops! (Tell me if you have flashbacks.) Suddenly, today, votes show up and vaulted the third-place person into second, with just a narrow lead remaining for Adams, with some 124,000+ absentee votes yet to count. Funny that.
NYC MAYOR ABSENTEE BALLOT MATH:
Right now, Adams leads Garcia 51.1% to 48.9% in the final round of ranked choice without absentee ballots.
There are 941832 votes counted and ~124k absentee ballots.
Garcia would need to win absentees about 58.4% to 41.6% to win.
Very doable.
— Ryan Matsumoto (@ryanmatsumoto1) June 29, 2021
The difference now is only about 16,000 votes, so it’s entirely conceivable now that Garcia could catch up.
Eric Adams is clearly not happy at all and he’s raising questions about where the 100,000 votes suddenly came from.
Eric Adams' statement, which goes there pic.twitter.com/xhYORu3Mqy
— Dana Rubinstein (@danarubinstein) June 29, 2021
“The vote total just released by the Board of Elections is 100,000-plus more than the total announced on election night, raising serious questions,” the Adams statement says. “We have asked the Board of Elections to explain such a massive increase and other irregularities before we comment on the Ranked Choice Voting projection. We remain confident that Eric Adams will be the next mayor of New York because he put together a historic five-borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, more affordable place.”
The 100,000 didn’t come from absentee ballots — they didn’t even start counting those yet. All they have is the day of and the early voting. So it seems a pretty good question.
The NY Board of Elections is saying they’re aware of a “discrepancy.”
We are aware there is a discrepancy in the unofficial RCV round by round elimination report. We are working with our RCV technical staff to identify where the discrepancy occurred. We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience.
— NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 29, 2021
100,000 votes is a pretty big “discrepancy,” if that’s what they’re talking about. But the NY Board of Elections is probably one of the worst in the country. The election was last Tuesday and we probably won’t know the winner until sometime in July. That’s insane. And they always have issues, every election.
But the huge swing now makes it more likely that Garcia will pull it out despite the huge lead that Adams had on election night. Sound familiar?
BREAKING: Kathryn Garcia now favored by US betting markets to beat Eric Adams in the NYC mayoral race following full RCV results. 131,000 absentee ballots remain to be counted. pic.twitter.com/5125LAnzjH
— The Matt Skidmore Show (@ZachandMattShow) June 29, 2021
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