NYC Primary Election Results May Not Be Announced for Weeks

By The City

For the first time, New York City will be using a ranked-choice voting system for some races. This means it will likely take weeks to have the full results of the election, CNN reported.

Thirteen Democrats and two Republicans are running in the New York City mayoral primaries today, according to NYC’s Board of Elections.

Polls close at 9 p.m. The first-place results will be published on the BOE website at some point after and will be updated every five minutes, officials say, along with what percentage of voting locations have been counted. The BOE will also release the number of absentee ballots that have been received as of Primary Day and the number still outstanding.

The week after Primary Day
On June 29, the city BOE will run the ranked choice voting tabulation and release another set of unofficial in-person results. The results will be published on the BOE’s website.

The reason for the seven-day gap: The BOE has to retrieve the vote counting machines from all the locations and add up all the data, which is a time-consuming process. These ranked choice results will not include absentee or affidavit ballots, so they will still be incomplete.

Two weeks after the election
On July 6, the BOE will publish another round of ranked-choice results, this time including some of the absentee ballots that have been counted. This may shed more light on who’s ahead, but the results won’t be official yet.

The cured absentee ballots with corrected errors aren’t due until July 9. In the past, one in five absentee ballots fell into this category, so an official count can’t happen until after voters get a chance to fix those errors. (Not everyone follows through; uncorrected votes get canceled.)

Three weeks after the election
We’ll officially know who the party nominees are when every vote is counted and the results are certified, most likely during the week of July 12.