In three primary races, all for City Council seats, the likely winner will be someone other than the candidate who led on election night, according to a City Limits analysis of the city.
The City Council, where only 14 women serve in a chamber of 51, is poised—for the first time—to become a majority female body with 29 women currently leading in their respective races.’
The Board of Elections released new preliminary numbers in the Democratic mayoral primary Wednesday, its second try at calculating ranked choice voting results for ballots that were cast in person last week. More than 124,000 absentee votes have yet to be tallied.
The latest unofficial count—which had yet to include more than 124,000 absentee ballots—showed former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia gaining on front runner Eric Adams, though the BOE later said there was a discrepancy in the tally. The final results in the mayoral race aren’t expected for another couple of weeks.
‘For me it’s not about choice—I know who I want to vote for and I voted for them,’ one voter told City Limits Tuesday. Other said they like RCV, and that it prompted them do more research about the candidates than they normally would.
“When voters voted for ranked-choice voting, we voted for it with the understanding that there’d be two years of city-wide education, which never came,” said Christian Amato, who has been polling Bronx residents on their awareness of the ranked-choice system.
Art Chang, co-creator of NYC Votes, and Joycelyn Taylor, an entrepreneur from Brooklyn, told City Limits on Monday that they would be cross-endorsing one another in the mayor’s race.
Observers say voters are more likely to rank their own votes and better understand the new system if they get encouragement from the system’s power players, like politicians, news outlets, labor unions and advocacy organizations—in the form of endorsements.
‘In jurisdictions dominated by one political party like New York City, Ranked Choice Voting alone likely won’t be an effective remedy for political divisions, since the partisans of the dominant party might lack a real incentive to care about the concerns of voters from the opposition party.’
Ranked-choice voting tallies have been underway in the special elections that occurred March 23.
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