Currents News Staff
Voting for the New York City Democratic primary for mayor started early. Even so, the end’s not near.
“This is not only a race for the mayor of New York, this is a race to save our city,” mayoral candidate Eric Adams said.
But the race could be a slow one. The results may not be known until July. If you’re wondering why, well, for one thing, election officials have to wait for thousands of absentee ballots and then count them. The absentee ballots are not due until a week after Primary Day.
Secondly, the city is using ranked-choice voting for the first time which complicates things.
“I believe in the promise of New York,” said mayoral candidate Andrew Yang.
One promise from election officials is that you will get information throughout the process. This is how it will go: only New Yorker’s first choice votes will be counted right away. If one candidate wins 50-percent of the first-choice votes, you have a winner. But with a pool of 13 Democrats, that’s unlikely.
So we go to the rankings. The last place candidate will be eliminated. If your first-choice candidate does not win and they’re eliminated, then your second-choice vote will be counted and added to that candidate’s total. That cycle continues until there is a winner.
The city’s Board of Elections plans to reveal the first round of ranked choice results a week after the primary, on June 29, on its website – and will continue to update the results once a week.
Therefore, it is possible that we may not know who New York City’s Democratic mayoral candidate will be…until the week of July 12!
“New York, we’ve got a big choice to make,” said mayoral candidate Maya Wiley.