Tag Archives: Bronx

Tuesday’s NYC Elections Results Expected to be Available Next Month

By Jim Ellis

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams

June 24, 2021 — Voters in New York City reached one of the election cycle’s benchmarks Tuesday, the actual primary election day; but we are still weeks away from seeing a formal declaration of who won the races.

NYC has been notoriously slow in counting ballots in a system that is encumbered with an extra post-election period to receive absentee ballots on top of a pre-election day early voting phase. Last year, for example, it literally took six weeks to determine that Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan) had been re-nominated in the 2020 Democratic primary.

This year, the city adopted the ranked-choice voting method, which even in the fastest counting jurisdictions has added days if not more than a week to determine a winner. Therefore, we will see another long, but this time better-planned, counting period.

In this 2021 election, the city clerk has published a schedule that will allow absentee ballots to be received through June 29, which also will be the release of the first round of ranked-choice results. Those figures will only be a partial count, however, because no absentee ballots will be added until after the reception deadline. More ranked-choice totals will be released on July 6, which the city official says will include “some” absentee ballots. Further, and likely final, releases will then come the week of July 12 that will include “more complete” absentee ballot counts.

All in all, the counting of the election ballots continues to be a lengthy and laborious task.

The ranked-choice system takes effect because no candidate received majority support. Now, the last-place finisher, candidate Isaac Wright, is eliminated. Officials will locate the ballots that ranked him first, and then add those voters’ second choices to the full count. If no one still reaches majority support, the next candidate with the lowest number of votes, in this case Joycelyn Taylor, will then have her 1st choice ballots located and those voters’ second choice added to the overall count. This process continues until a candidate exceeds 50 percent.

Turning to what has been reported for last night’s tabulations, as predicted, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams has the lead as he has so far captured 32 percent of the counted votes. Civil rights attorney and activist Maya Wiley, with support from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bronx) and the party’s far left faction, placed second with 22 percent, just ahead of former NYC Sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia who pulled 19 percent.

Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who led early in many polls, is effectively eliminated as he placed fourth with just under 12 percent of the total vote, or almost 20 full percentage points behind Adams. Since it is unlikely that the ranked-choice process would catapult him back into serious contention, Yang conceded his fate in media interviews.

In the early counting, Adams has healthy leads in four of the city’s five boroughs. He is running strongest in the Bronx, where he leads Wiley and Garcia, 45-17-10 percent. He has an eight-point lead over Wiley in his home borough of Brooklyn, tops Wiley 33-19 percent in Queens, and holds a 31-20 percent advantage over Garcia in Staten Island. The only borough where Adams trails is Manhattan, where Garcia places first with 32 percent and Adams only slots into third with 19 percent, three percentage points behind Wiley.

Adams’ lead is such that he is likely to win the Democratic primary once the weeks pass and the final count becomes known. The Adams nomination victory will foretell him winning the mayor’s office in November, as New York’s 7:1 Democrat to Republican ratio leaves little doubt as to the general election outcome.

Two other New York mayors did not fare as well as Adams in their respective Buffalo and Rochester primaries. These cities did not employ the ranked-choice system, so their results are much clearer today.

Four-term Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown appears to have lost his bid to win re-nomination for a fifth four-year term with still about 50 precincts outstanding. He will likely fall to self-proclaimed socialist India Walton. At-large Rochester City Councilman Malik Evans scored a landslide nomination victory over Mayor Lovely Warren by a virtual 2:1 margin.

In addition to the NYC mayor’s race, all 51 city council districts were also on the ballot, and each must now go through the ranked-choice counting process. To see the New York City official election results in this era of lightning quick technology, we must turn the clock all the way ahead to the week of July 12.

Could Elizabeth Holtzman Return in New York’s 9th CD?

New York City congressional districts.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) has set the date for the special election to choose a successor for former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY-9). The vote is set for Sept. 13 and is New York’s second such special congressional election to be held this year, both necessitated to replace congressmen who resigned in disgrace after publicly revealing electronic messages and pictures. This is the same day as primaries for other Empire State offices as well the special election date to fill six vacant state assembly seats.

Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY-7), who represents a district adjacent to NY-9, also serves as the Democratic Party’s chairman for the Borough of Queens. Under New York law, it is the county political party chairmen who choose special election nominees. Because approximately 70 percent of the 9th District is within Queens, Crowley alone has the virtual power to choose the Democratic general election candidate. He is expected to reach a decision in the next day or two.

The congressman reportedly wants “an elder statesman without long-term ambitions” to fill the Weiner seat. He now has the opportunity of ensuring that the new Democratic nominee will allow the 9th CD to be eliminated in redistricting so that Crowley himself can assume much of the Queens territory that was once Weiner’s. New York loses two seats in reapportionment. Such a move will allow him to jettison the Bronx portion of his current district, an area that is becoming heavily Hispanic, and give him a seat wholly within the Borough of Queens. Collapsing the 9th will also mean that Rep. Gary Ackerman’s (D) 5th district, a hybrid seat between Queens and Long Island, will likely survive the redistricting pen, as well.

The person currently being mentioned as having the inside track for the nomination is former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman (D). The ex-representative reportedly reached out to Crowley shortly after Weiner’s resignation and now appears to be the top Democratic prospect.

During her 1970’s tenure in the House (four terms; 1973-1981), Holtzman represented a portion of the current 9th District. She was succeeded by now-Sen. Chuck Schumer (D), whose own election to the Senate opened the door for Weiner to win the congressional seat. Holtzman ended her career in Congress by losing a 1980 U.S. Senate race to then-Nassau County Board of Supervisors Chairman Alfonse D’Amato. She made a political comeback of sorts at the municipal level, winning election in Kings County (Brooklyn) for district attorney and later as New York City comptroller. Her 1992 Democratic primary bid for the right to square off against D’Amato again ended in another Holtzman loss, this time a rather humiliating fourth place finish. An unsuccessful primary fight to retain her party’s nomination for the city comptroller position the next year effectively ended her career in elective politics. Now at age 70, Holtzman may fit the bill of an “elder statesman” who can win the race in September, and will then fade quietly away when the 9th district is eliminated as a casualty of reapportionment.

Should Holtzman be appointed the nominee, she will begin the special election campaign as the favorite but the seat has some chance of becoming competitive as Republicans plan to wage a significant campaign. More will be known when the GOP nominee is actually chosen.
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The Weiner Scandal Winner: Rep. Joe Crowley

The Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY-9) sexting scandal could be paying long-term benefits for a neighboring Borough of Queens congressman. Because New York is losing two seats in reapportionment, Rep. Weiner’s once personal, now very public, exploits have made his 9th Congressional District (CD) the No. 1 target in New York for collapsing. Of the state’s 29 CD’s, all of which will require more population in the 2011 redistricting process (which is the fundamental reason for the delegation losing two seats), five of the top 10 under-populated districts reside in New York City.

The current scenario favors neighboring Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY-7), because his Queens/Bronx seat is becoming more heavily minority. This make him potentially vulnerable to a primary challenge from a Hispanic Democrat in the ensuing decade, thus he will want more territory from Queens and less from The Bronx in his new district. Since approximately 70% of Weiner’s district encompasses Queens’ territory, it is easy to combine pieces from both NY-7 and NY-9 into a seat totally within the Borough of Queens.

Of the five CD’s that contain all or part of Queens, Rep. Gregory Meeks’ 6th district is the only seat fully contained within the borough. Adding another Queens-specific CD is at least one of the arguments Mr. Crowley’s personal lobbyist will make in Albany when he attempts to secure a favorable district for the seven-term congressional veteran. Three NY Representatives — Crowley, Eliot Engel (D-NY-17) and Brian Higgins (D-NY-27) — each have hired a personal lobbyist to make specific redistricting arguments to the governing powers in the legislature.

But, what if Weiner resigns? Crowley has that covered, too. In New York, as we have seen in the four other special congressional elections held in the state during the past election cycle, the local county chairmen are the people who choose mid-cycle election nominees. Who is the Borough of Queens Democratic chairman? None other than Rep. Joe Crowley. So, should Weiner resign, it is Crowley who will virtually decide the identity of the next congressman, meaning he will choose someone who won’t run for a full term, making it a virtual certainty that the current 9th district will be one of the disappearing seats.

The other collapsed district will likely come from upstate. The Buffalo/Rochester area seats, numbered 28 (Rep. Louise Slaughter) and 27 (Higgins) need to gain the greatest number of people. Chances are the upstate loss will come from the Republicans.

With a late September primary, New York is typically one of the last states to complete its redistricting process, so the final lines will not be known until well into next year. Since Democrats control the governor’s office and the state Assembly, and Republicans hold the state Senate, the chances of redistricting ending in a legislative deadlock are high — meaning a court-drawn map likely will be the eventual solution.

Regardless of who draws the map, it is relatively clear that one of the lost seats will come from New York City and the other from upstate, with the Long Island districts all moving west, closer to New York City.

While the Weiner scandal is destroying the congressman’s career within the House, its timing is also poor from his personal political perspective. While he may stay in office to finish the current term, Weiner’s long-term congressional career prospects, because of the reapportionment and redistricting scenario described above, are highly unfavorable.
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