Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani’s strong performance in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary last Tuesday turned him into a national figure overnight, as his upstart campaign overtook that of the longtime front-runner, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. But it was not enough to make him the official nominee.
That victory is likely to come on Tuesday.
Since Mr. Mamdani received less than 50 percent of the vote in the first round of counting, a runoff was triggered under New York City’s relatively new ranked-choice voting system. The system allows voters to rank up to five candidates in order of preference. Now, the candidates with the least first-choice support will be eliminated, round by round, and their votes redistributed to voters’ next choices.
The Board of Elections will release the ranked-choice results on Tuesday, one week after the primary. Here’s what to know:
When will the results be available?
The ranked-choice voting results are slated to be released online at noon, according to a news release from the Board of Elections.
What will they include?
The Board of Elections said it would report the tally of all the ballots that were counted during the city’s nine days of in-person early voting and on Primary Day, as well as mail-in ballots received and processed by Primary Day.
The board plans to release updated numbers weekly on Tuesdays until all ballots are counted and final results certified. The final results will include absentee ballots.
There were 11 candidates in the race. With an estimated 93 percent of the vote counted last Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani had the support of 43.5 percent of the city’s Democratic primary voters, leading Mr. Cuomo by about seven percentage points.
How many ranked-choice rounds will there be?
Mayor Eric Adams won the 2021 Democratic primary, the first to use the ranked-choice system, after the eighth round — besting Kathryn Garcia, then the sanitation commissioner, by 7,197 votes. During the early rounds, candidates were eliminated one at a time.
Then, in Round 4, the bottom four candidates were bounced all at once. This is known as batch elimination, and it occurred because their combined first-choice vote totals amounted to less than that of any other candidate above them, making it mathematically impossible for them to win.
Steven Romalewski, director of the Mapping Service at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Urban Research, expects batch elimination to happen far earlier in the process this year. Exactly 199,401 voters gave their top ballot slot to a candidate other than Mr. Mamdani or Mr. Cuomo. That is far fewer than the roughly 362,000 New Yorkers who backed Mr. Cuomo.
That means Brad Lander, the city comptroller who was a distant third on Primary Day, and all the other candidates would be eliminated in the first round and their votes redistributed. It is possible that there will only be two rounds of tabulations. (There are likely to be tens of thousands of absentee ballots that arrived on or after Primary Day, but Mr. Romalewski said he did not believe they would substantially change the math.)
“I think the speed of this is going to be surprising for a lot of people,” Mr. Romalewski said, adding that he estimates that Mr. Mamdani would need to win a third of the eligible redistributed ballots to get over 50 percent and officially lock up the primary.
When will we see Brad Lander’s votes?
Mr. Lander ended last Tuesday with about 11 percent of the vote. His cross-endorsement with Mr. Mamdani, where each candidate encouraged his supporters to rank the other second, was seen as a pivotal moment during the campaign’s final days.
If Mr. Lander is eliminated along with the other eight candidates, it is not clear when New Yorkers will be able to see where his votes flowed. In 2021, the Board of Elections did not immediately provide data showing how individual candidates’ votes were redistributed after batch eliminations. That information eventually became public after the election was certified.
The Board of Elections did not respond to several questions about how it would be presenting the results when they are released on Tuesday.
What is Mr. Cuomo looking for?
Mr. Mamdani’s success showed that his campaign had reshaped the race in ways that Mr. Cuomo, the more experienced and better-funded candidate, did not predict.
The former governor, who will appear on a third-party ballot line in the November general election, must now decide whether he wants to campaign against Mr. Mamdani; Mr. Adams, who is running as an independent; Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate; and Jim Walden, another independent candidate.
Rich Azzopardi, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, said the campaign expected most of Mr. Lander’s votes to flow to Mr. Mamdani, whom he said had expanded “the primary electorate in such a way that threw off every poll and every turnout model.”
But since no other candidate garnered significant support, Mr. Azzopardi said in a statement Monday that “we don’t expect the final tabulations tomorrow to be all that revelatory — we’ll be examining the expected makeup and opinions of general electorate voters while determining next steps.”
Eden Weingart contributed reporting.
Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times.
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