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This week, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers made their way out to their nearest polling location — or post office — to cast their ballots for the dozens of primary elections taking place this June.
The ever-important mayoralty is up for grabs this year, with 11 candidates vying for the position in the Democratic primary alone. Many City Council district seats also have competitive primaries.
After choosing your ranked slate of candidates at the polls, you’re going to want to know: Did your top picks win?
For an answer, have patience. We may not know those official results until weeks after the polls close.
Here’s everything we know about this year’s primary results, from how the votes are counted to when we can expect to see unofficial and official results:
Are we going to get results on primary night?
Yes we’ll see some results that night, but may not have a definitive answer about who won.
The city Board of Elections will release unofficial, first-choice-only votes after the polls close at 9 p.m. on primary night, June 24.
Those results will include votes made in person at a polling site, as well as any early mail or absentee ballots that the election board receives and scans by Jun. 20, according to its deputy executive director Vincent Ignizio.
The initial tally won’t include votes from affidavit ballots. We’ll get to those later.
The results are broken down into election and assembly districts and can be found on the city Board of Elections website. If you don’t know which election district you live in, their website also has a lookup tool for that.
What we won’t know on election night is the ranked-choice tabulation in which the bottom candidates are eliminated and votes for them redistributed (more on this process in a bit).
Is there any way the election will be called on Primary Day?
Kind of.
If any candidate wins more than 50% of first-choice votes on election night, they would effectively bypass the full ranked-choice counting process. But with polling showing how close the mayoral race may be, that’s unlikely for that race.
OK, so when will we get a clear picture of the winner?
A week after election night, the elections board will release a preliminary tabulation of ranked choice calculations, Ignizio said. That means you will be able to see all the “rounds,” or cycles of vote transfers and eliminations, according to preliminary, non-certified results.
As a reminder, the ranked-choice method allows voters to choose up to five candidates in order of preference. The candidates with the fewest votes in any particular round get eliminated, and if you ranked any of those candidates first on your ballot, then your vote will get transferred to your next highest-ranked candidate, and so on.
Remember, you don’t have to rank five candidates if you don’t have a quintet of mayoral hopefuls you think would do a good job. You can stop at any point before that.
In the 2021 primary race, the ranked-choice results published to the Board of Elections’ website showed the candidates who got eliminated during each round, the number of transferred votes each remaining candidate received during each round, and the number of rounds it took for one candidate to reach more than 50% of first-choice votes.
Ignizio said most, if not all, of this data will be included in the tabulations published a week after Primary Day.
When will we see official results? And why does this take so long?
We’ll likely see official, certified results three weeks after the election, when the deadline to receive all cured ballots ends on July 14. The elections board will move to certify the results the following day at its commissioner’s meeting, Ignizio said.
The delay is not due to ranked choice voting itself, said Susan Lerner, the executive director of the good-government group Common Cause New York. Rather, it’s due to state voting laws that give voters ample time to mail and, if necessary, correct their ballots.
“Here in New York, we want to be sure that no voter is unnecessarily disenfranchised and that votes are received and accurately counted,” Lerner said.
For instance, early mail and absentee voters can postmark their ballots for dates up to and including Primary Day. For the votes to count toward the official results, the ballots must be received by the Board of Elections within seven days of that.
And there may be lots of mail-in ballots to count. As of June 11, voters requested more than 106,000 mail-in ballots from the city Board of Elections, and the BOE had received about 17% of them back so far, equal to about 18,300 ballots. For a point of comparison, the 2021 mayoral primary was decided by just over 7,000 votes out of about 1 million cast.
Also due to state laws, these voters are given the opportunity to correct, or “cure,” their ballots if the elections board finds an error upon receiving them. After being notified of the need for a correction, voters have seven days to finish their part of the cure process and return the ballots.
There are also those voters who show up to the polls ready to cast their ballots, but for whatever reason, they cannot due to a discrepancy in their voter file. When this happens, voters have the right to request and fill out an affidavit ballot. These ballots aren’t processed until after the polls close.
Wasn’t there a vote count problem in the last mayoral primary? Can I trust the results from the BOE?
Four years ago, New Yorkers for the first time voted for the next mayor of the city using ranked choice. But soon after releasing preliminary results, the elections board announced that it had incorrectly included in those results 135,000 test ballots.
The debacle threw the mayor’s race into limbo.
Lerner said voters shouldn’t be concerned about the elections board’s ability to produce accurate results this time around.
“I think it was a very unusual, one-off situation,” she said. “We haven’t seen anything similar.”
Still, with that episode in mind, Ignizio said that the Board of Elections has “implemented additional checks and balances internally” to make sure that what’s released in the following weeks after the primary is accurate.
