In a sign that its inaugural attempt at rank voting in its Democratic mayoral primary is more troublesome than thought, the New York City Board of Elections pulled down a website tally of votes Tuesday hours after posting some initial results, the Wall Street Journal reports.
Initial tallies showed Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams leading former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia by less than three percentage points. The results had Adams at 51.1% of the vote, with Garcia garnering 48.9% of the ballots.
However, before rank choice counting kicked in, Garcia had been in third place, trailing Adams and Maya Wiley, who was in second place. The website said more than 920,000 votes had been counted, but other tallies showed just 800,000 votes had been counted; both numbers claimed to be the number of in-person votes cast.
“We ask the public, elected officials and candidates to have patience,” the board said. There are also more than 124,000 mail-in ballots that have yet to be cast.
While this is just the Democratic primary, the winning candidate is expected to win the general election against Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels who won the Republican primary.