Tag Archives: Eric Adams

Youngkin Wins in Virginia;
New Jersey’s Races are Teetering;
Ohio Congressional Races & More

By Jim Ellis

Nov. 3, 2021 — Republican Glenn Youngkin claimed the Virginia governor’s race with his victory over former Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D), becoming the first Republican to win a Virginia statewide office since the 2009 election.

In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli is fighting Gov. Phil Murphy (D) to a virtual tie, but outstanding ballots suggest the Democratic governor may barely hang on to win a second term. It was a surprisingly strong showing for Ciattarelli in such a heavily Democratic state. Though both houses of the New Jersey legislature will remain under Democratic control, Republicans appear to have added seats in both chambers.

While mail votes are still being tallied and other ballots can be received in Virginia until Friday, it appears Youngkin did exceed the 50 percent plateau with McAuliffe about two percentage points behind. The Youngkin victory helped pull his lieutenant governor Republican partner, Winsome Sears, over the top to claim the state’s second position.

The Virginia attorney general’s race features another Republican, state Delegate Jason Miyares, leading incumbent Mark Herring (D), who is running for a third term. This is the closest of the three races, so uncounted mail ballots and votes to be received after election day could make a difference. Some entities have projected Miyares a winner, and he is certainly in the better position, but the final outcome may not yet be conclusive.

Several other races are still close, but Republicans may have converted the six seats they need to re-claim the state House majority. In any event, the party gained seats.

Turnout was higher than expected in Virginia. More that 3.2 million ballots have been tabulated, meaning that more than 73 percent of the number of people who voted in the record setting 2020 election returned to cast their votes in the 2021 governor’s race. When comparing the 2017 gubernatorial election to the 2016 presidential, the return rate was 66 percent.

OHIO

In the US House, two new Ohio members-elect completed their special election victories with ease. In the vacant Cleveland-Akron seat that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge (D) represented, Democratic Cuyahoga County Councilwoman Shontel Brown, as expected, easily won the congressional special general election with 79 percent of of the vote.

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NYC Ranked Voting – Any Difference?

NYC Democracy produced a voter palm card to help guide voters in a ranked-choice voting scenario.

By Jim Ellis

July 9, 2021 — The Ranked Choice Voting system was on major display in the New York City primary races that began with early voting on June 12 and ended yesterday with declaration of winners. Adding early voting and Ranked Choice Voting in lieu of traditional ballot casting created a 26-day election period, but did the expanded voting cycle change any results?

Ranked Choice Voting is a variation of an instant runoff, a concept that dates back to a similar system first used in Australia in 1918. The idea is to prevent a person from winning a plurality election with a just a small percentage, i.e., Brooklyn Borough president Eric Adams would have won the New York City mayoral Democratic primary with 30.8 percent of the vote on the single election day of June 22 had the traditional system been in place. This means that 69.2 percent of voters chose another candidate.

Instead, after the 26-day election period, Adams still won the party nomination under Ranked Choice Voting but with a convoluted 50.5 percent majority vote at the conclusion of a marathon counting process.

For years, mostly southern states have used a runoff system to correct the problem of a candidate winning an election with a small percentage, such as NYC’s Adams’ 30.8 percent recorded on June 22. In those places, a secondary election is held between the top two finishers at a later date. Ranked Choice Voting allegedly produces a majority result, but without the expense of running a second election.

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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.