New York City officials are re-doing the first rounds of ranked-choice vote tabulations for the city’s mayoral, borough-wide, and council elections after mistakenly including 135,000 test votes in their election data reporting system used to relay results to the public.
The city’s Board of Elections announced in a Tuesday night statement that “ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System” used for reporting and tallying the results of ranked-choice votes.
The Board plans to remove the dummy test votes from the cast vote record, re-upload election night results, re-generate the cast vote record, and then re-run ranked-choice rounds.
Unofficial, unranked election night results from only early and Election Day in-person votes showed Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the lead, followed by New York City Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia and civil rights attorney Maya Wiley. Over 120,000 absentee ballots cast in the Democratic primary have yet to be counted and tabulated.
Since no candidate won over 50% of the vote outright in the Democratic mayoral primary, the votes earned by the candidate who comes in last place are redistributed up to the next-best performing candidate. The process then continues up the chain until one candidate finally earns a majority of the vote.
