Adams again tops Garcia in mayoral re-tally that still doesn’t count
The city’s bumbling Board of Elections said Wednesday that Eric Adams maintained his lead in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary — one day after officials threw the race into chaos with a botched count.
Preliminary results posted on the embattled election agency’s website showed Adams narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia, 358,521 votes (51.1 percent} to 343,766 (48.9 percent).
In an ironic twist, the percentages are identical to the ones reported Tuesday, when Garcia overtook Maya Wiley to vault into second place pending the counting of absentee ballots.
But the vote spread between Adams and Garcia shrank to 14,755 from 15,908.
In a statement, Adams’ campaign called the results a “simulation,” adding: “Our campaign was the first choice of voters on Election Day and is leading this race by a significant margin because we put together a five-borough working class coalition of New Yorkers to make our city a safer, fairer, more affordable place.”
“There are still absentee ballots to be counted that we believe favor Eric–and we are confident we will be the final choice of New Yorkers when every vote is tallied.”Garcia said in a statement, “While we remain confident in our path to victory, we are taking nothing for granted and encourage everyone to patiently wait for over 124,000 absentee ballots to be counted and included in the ranked choice voting tabulation.”
“Every candidate should respect the democratic process and be committed to supporting whomever the voters have selected to be the Democratic nominee for Mayor,” she added.
The new numbers were released after the BOE on Tuesday posted — and later took down — its tallies of 11 rounds of in-person and early voting in the city’s first ranked-choice election.
In a public apology late Tuesday night, the BOE said those results included a test run of 135,000 fake votes that weren’t cleared from its computer system.
The error marked the latest in a series of screw-ups that have plagued recent elections in the city.
But the corrected count is far from complete, with more than 125,000 mail-in, absentee ballots that arrived ahead of Tuesday’s deadline still being counted.
In a statement, Wiley said, “With more than 120,000 absentee ballots left to count – in addition to provisional ballots and potential recanvassing of results – this election is still wide open.”
On Tuesday, the number of outstanding votes led critics to question why the BOE even released Tuesday’s preliminary results, with veteran political consultant Sid Davidoff calling the numbers “relatively meaningless.”
“It would have been more beneficial for them to wait until they had a complete picture rather than further muddy the waters in an already confusing issue,” added Davidoff, a former aide to the late Mayor John Lindsay.
The final results are scheduled to be released on July 6.
Tuesday’s epic fail has sparked calls for reform that include disbanding the 10-member Board of Elections, which is composed of five Democrats and five Republicans — one each from the city’s five boroughs — who are hand-picked by their local party leaders.
“We’ve seen some pretty bad errors before, but this one seems to be a national embarrassment,” city Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said Wednesday.
“Hopefully, the national nature of this will finally spur some change.”
Also Wednesday, The Post exclusively revealed that the BOE’s executive director, Mike Ryan, has been on medical leave since March amid a battle with stage 4 cancer.
BOE Deputy Executive Director Dawn Sandow, a Bronx Republican political appointee, has been filling in for Ryan, but a fellow GOP official described her as a “disaster,” adding, “She isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.”
In response, a BOE spokeswoman said, “Ms. Sandow has worked for the Board since 2005 and served as our Deputy Executive Director for over a decade. She served as acting Executive Director from 2010 to 2013. She has helped oversee the implementation of the new voting system, launch Election Night Reporting and Early Voting.”
