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Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Today is the day that most of the absentee ballot results are being released in the New York City primary. These could very well be decisive for mayor and other offices. We will keep following the rollout of these returns. We are told they will be a brunch time release. It's already brunch time where I come from, there was also news over the weekend in case you missed it, and another move, bringing doubts about its competence.

The board of elections released more ranked-choice voting results on Friday night, starting the holiday weekend around 10:15 PM, Friday night of July 4th weekend. In fairness, maybe they released them as soon as that phase of the counting was done. One result, not in a ranked-choice voting contest, but in a non-ranked-choice voting contest. We can now say with high confidence that Alvin Bragg will be the next Manhattan DA, in case you missed that over the weekend.

His main opponent Tali Farhadian Weinstein conceited based on the new numbers. Don't make any plans between now and maybe Labor Day. All three major mayoral candidates are reminding us that they reserve the right to ask for a full hand recount of the results, if the results are within 0.5% point, that is standard, but with the layered math and the many rounds of ranked-choice voting, it's anyone's guess how they would do that or how long it would take. With me now, Josefa Velasquez covering the primaries for the nonprofit news organization, The City, and our own David Cruz covering them for Gothamist. Good morning, Josefa. Good morning, David.

David: Good morning.

Josefa: Good morning.

Brian: Josefa watched this prospect of a hand recount. Can you give us more details on that scenario?

Josefa: It seems that the leading mayoral candidates are gearing themselves up for what's likely going to become a contentious fight over who is the Democratic nominee. Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, and Maya Wiley's campaigns have all hired lawyers and filed preliminary lawsuits ahead of the news of today to have a judge oversee the counting and possibly the hand counting, if necessary, of all of these remaining ballots. If there's one thing that we can probably be certain of is that despite whatever the results will be today, it's not going to be the end for these candidates, are going to keep fighting tooth and nail for every vote.

Brian: What would be involved in a hand recount, as you understand it, how many people would that take? How long would it take, and how many different locations in the many voting precincts around the city would it have to occur?

Josefa: From what we know so far, a hand recount can take weeks. We're talking about over a million New Yorkers who voted in New York City. That could take a really long time. We've seen this play out nationally where you do have campaigns sitting there observing the votes and going through a large sample of trying to duke it out to the last minute.

Brian: David, what are we expecting to learn today? I think you're the one who told us about that "brunch time" projection for when the ballots-- Oh, it was just-- I'm sorry, Josefa, it was you, but David, I'll ask you anyway, what are we expecting today?

David: We're slightly on a holding pattern, just like the mayor's race. We're waiting on the official tally of the absentee ballot to decide a number of races, including most borough president and city council races. From what we can see, it looks like at least over two dozen or so council races may have been decided, even without having to count the absentee ballots, and there's about another dozen or so up in the air. Most borough president races are also up in the air, but from what we can see, with respect to the Bronx borough president's race, for example, the top-tier candidates, council members, Vanessa Gibson and Fernando Cabrera, are separated by just over 5,000 in-person votes.

When you see where the absentee ballots are coming from, about 9,000 of those absentee ballots cast were in districts where Gibson had 1 versus 2,300 absentees where Cabrera 1.

This increases Gibson's chance of a victory. I would say that Gibson victory would be history-making in the sense that she'll be the first woman to be elected for that Bronx post. She'll also be the first Black woman to be elected to the seat as well. Of course, we have Queens, Queens and other type race. We're seeing it's neck and neck between the Borough President, Donovan Richards, and a former council woman, Elizabeth Crowley, by just a couple thousand votes.

The numbers [inaudible 00:05:16] 22,000 submitted absentee ballots in districts, where Elizabeth Crowley 1 versus just over 9,600 or so absentees where Donovan won. That one is very- it's just too close to call, but we do know with certainty that the Manhattan borough president's race will likely go to Council Member, Mark Levine after state Senator, Fred Wellman ended up conceding the race. This all but guarantees that Levine will be the next Manhattan borough president.

Brian: I guess that's maybe the biggest news other than Manhattan DA from over the weekend. This apparent victory for Council Member Levine to be the next borough president of Manhattan. Remind our listeners who didn't follow that race closely, what he run on Manhattan borough president, everything in Manhattan is a little larger than life. The Manhattan DA, whether it's Cy Vance today or apparently Alvin Bragg tomorrow, they get so many national cases in their lab, cases with national implications like this Trump organization prosecution. There's that, and same thing with Manhattan borough president. Scott stringer was Manhattan Borough President, and of course went on to citywide office as comptroller and then running for mayor. This is a relatively big deal in citywide terms, what is Mark Levine promising to do?

David: Levine really raised his profile this during the election season, especially even before he ran, he really raised his profile as being the stalwart legislator when it came to calling out how serious the COVID crisis was. He really just, I guess, distinguished himself from the rest of the council members. He was the chair of the Health Committee, but he did campaign on this promise to elevate small businesses. He definitely got a lot of attention with the unions, especially 32BJ.

He's probably one of the more respected city council members, and he'll likely get a lot of support and help from his former members on the council. He really seemed to capture the pulse of what is needed for Manhattan, which is recovery. I think that's how he and, I think, all the other borough presidents who will take over, we'll have to contend with recovery.

Brian: Listeners, your calls, welcome on anything about the state of the New York primary hand recounts. Alvin Bragg's apparent victory, Mark Levine's apparent victory, any city council or a borough president's race. What do you want to say, or what do you want to ask our guests? Gothamist David Cruz and Josefa Velasquez from the news organization, The City. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280, or tweet your question or comment @Brian Lehrer on this day that we're expecting any hour now the absentee ballot results, the first round of them to be released, which could be decisive still in the mayoral race depending on how they come out. Josefa, one of your articles for The City is a breakdown of where the absentee ballots being released today are coming from. David just gave us a little version of that for some of the borough president's races, and what they seem to suggest the outcomes are going to be. Do they seem to track the in-person turnout for a mayor?

Josefa: Yes, it seems that, right now, there is some 125,000 absentee ballots that haven't yet been counted. Those ballots will be included in the board of elections tabulations that's supposed to be released later today. We get a sense of who, what the standings are for these candidates, and what we're seeing so far that it could really go either way.

Eric Adams is leading the batch of Democrats by some 15,000 votes, but about a 1/3 of the absentee ballots that have been returned so far are from Manhattan, including a lot of areas where Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, was ranked highest among the in-person voters, and Maya Wiley close by being ranked as number two for a lot of these voters. In other places like Queens and Brooklyn, where roughly a third of the ballots came from both of those boroughs, from each of those boroughs rather, those are areas that were largely split by the three leading Democratic mayoral candidates. It's hard to say who's going to benefit from this latest batch of mayoral or absentee ballots. This is all to say that the tabulation that we're going to get today and the ranking that we're going to get today are preliminary. We still have until Thursday to receive what are called "cured ballots." Those are ballots that have been returned to voters to fix any errors. Those will be returned on Thursday.

We still have possibly provisional ballots that people filled out on the day of. We'll know, as early as July 12th, who might be the next mayor of New York City, but it could also drag on a lot longer considering it's possible that it'll be so close that there will be a manual recount.

Brian: The reason I keep saying it could be a decisive day today for the mayoral nomination, and you're closer to it than I am, so disabuse me of this notion if it's just completely wrong, is because I don't think there are very many "cured ballots," the ones where the voter sends in an absentee ballot and makes some technical mistake, like not signing their name or something like that, and they get to go back and fix it. Obviously, they can't change who they voted for. If there's some technical error that would make the vote not count, it's in the system that they get the chance to do that.

There aren't that many of those, is my understanding, likely, and not that many affidavit ballots where people showed up at a polling place, and there was some problem with casting their vote. If it comes out today, especially for Adams with enough of the gap that those few remaining ballots won't make a difference, that's how we could know today, or do you think that's just totally unrealistic?

Josefa: Given this election cycle, where everything has seemed possible and all conventional political wisdom has been thrown out the window, it's possible. We could see bad outcome today where one candidate pulls through far enough that it becomes mathematically impossible for another candidate to challenge them. Again, it could be a couple of hundred votes or a couple thousand votes that makes the difference.

If that's the case, then we go into a manual recount, given the laws that govern our election. If two candidates are 0.5% of a difference, then we start all over with the voting count, and experts say that could take weeks to do. I'm planning for all possible outcomes, given that this election cycle's thrown us all for a twist.

Brian: As I'm thinking about this hand recount scenario, there could theoretically be multiple rounds of them, right? Where we are right now, before these absentee ballots are counted, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia are within a half point of each other. A hand recount could be invoked there. That's just for second place. Then, whoever wins that would wind up getting compared with the ranked-choice system to Eric Adams, and maybe that will wind up with a half point or less between them. If you're saying it could take weeks to do a hand recount at any individual round of ranked-choice voting, that could be a lot of weeks.

Josefa: Yes. Next week will be, what? a month since Election Day? This whole process has taken quite some time. I'm pretty sure I've gotten a new wrinkle and lived a lifetime between Election Day and now. Who knows if this is the end or if this is just the beginning of a long summer of back and forth between the candidates trying to determine who's going to be the city's next executive?

Brian: David, were you on the beat of ranked-choice voting numbers for borough president and city council races and other things on Friday night? Were you working Friday night going into the holiday weekend at 10:15 when the Board of Elections actually released them?

David: Yes, my day stretched for a good 15 hours after that. I actually thought that the results would come out this week, though, this past Tuesday, but then there was a delay. Then the next day we thought that the results would come out, and then there was another delay, and then another delay. Then, we were then left on this very weird, get a holding pattern in terms of waiting for the results to come out. I actually thought that they were not going to release the results until this Tuesday, because they were not going to be in on Sunday or Monday. Then, around 10:15, I look at Twitter and I see that the results came out and my head just kind of exploded at that point.

Although I have to tell you, I had pre-written some of what I was going to write in advance knowing, given that the Board of Elections simply just does not give a heads-up, they've really been extremely coy on when they would release these results. Luckily, I think I've seen this before in many races I've covered in the past that you just want to prepare and have something ready to go.

We had put out a story around it a little bit after midnight. It was simply because we had pre-written, but we were extremely careful in terms of our wording as well, because even the ones where we think are going to win, we don't know with a 100% certainty simply because-- If anything, if the race with Tiffany Cabán and Melinda Katz for Queens DA is any indicator. It's like the absentee ballots could really flip the outcome of an election and we'll left having to rewrite a major draft.

Brian: We don't want premature release of numbers that might be inaccurate, we've seen that happen in past elections nationally, where it causes such a tremendous problem and political blow-back and lack of trust in the system and everything else. We don't want premature release of numbers that might be inaccurate. I'm hesitant about criticizing the Board of Elections too much for allegedly slow walking these. They had told us they would be released last Wednesday, then Thursday, then Friday. Then it turned out 10:15 PM Friday night, what caused such a delay?

David: For me, it's really hard to say. I think what had happened with the mayoral results, obviously, the 135,000 dummy ballots had been folded in with the real ballots, and that caused confusion. I'd never got a response from the Board of Elections as to why there was a delay, but what I can glean from it is that they did not want to repeat the same error that they had committed in the past, folding in test ballots with real ballots. It seems to me that they were really hoping to get this right. In terms of folks wanting to see a better process, the next go round. Folks I'd spoken with said, "These simply just released both the absentees with the first-choice ballots all together to avoid any kind of confusion."

Because, I think, when you release these results, I think, to people who are capping attention to it, they think that these are the final results. Then you have to explain to them that these are just simply preliminary votes. Folks tell me that one way to clear up the confusion is by simply just releasing it all at the same time. That probably may make a whole lot more sense, although from what I can tell you, there are some measures up in the Albany legislature to actually count the ballots as they come in, and to give voters an even better sense of just what to expect.

Brian: Josefa, what are they saying about when the absentee ballots for mayor and everything else will be released today? I guess we got it from one of your tweets that they're projecting "brunch time," but I don't know about your neighborhood. In my neighborhood, brunch can start at ten o'clock and go till for four.

Josefa: Right, exactly. It's up for interpretation. That's been one of the issues with the Board of Elections, is that their communication hasn't been great throughout this process. Earlier today, the Board of Elections in response to someone tweeted that the latest tabulations for the primary will be out during brunch time, as opposed to, I think, they called it "club time" on Friday evening. What that means is as good of a guess as anything. It could be in the next couple of minutes. It could be four or five o'clock, depending on where you brunch. It's emblematic of the issues that the Board of Elections has been dealing with. Not just during this primary, but in previous years where, during elections, it highlights that the board is not necessarily equipped to handle this amount of pressure, and it has been an election like no other. We're talking about an entirely new voting system for New Yorkers, as well as an increased amount of absentee ballots, thanks to primary rules that loosened who could vote by mail. Doing all of this while navigating a pandemic that's still going on, so it's been a lot of pressure for the borough to rise up to the occasion. It seems that now, giving their snafu over the dummy votes that were counted, and ultimately removed from the tally, that lawmakers, both at the city level and at the state level, are calling for hearings to figure out how to reform what's going on at the Board of Elections.

Brian: Josefa, I saw that one of your articles in the last few days describes high turnout in some districts, including AOC's district in Queens. You singled that one out and some similar ones, but not where COVID hit the hardest. That was the contrast you made. What contrast were you trying to make more specifically?

Josefa: It seems that these neighborhoods where they were the early epicenter of the pandemic, voter turnout wasn't as high as it was in other places. We're talking about like Corona Queens, Elmhurst, those areas that were hit particularly hard from the virus. These were also areas that have been largely neglected by the mayoral candidates. Not all of them stopped in those neighborhoods, or if they did, it was not very frequently, compared to stops in Park Slope or in Harlem, on the Upper West Side, areas that do normally have high voter turnout, especially in primaries.

That's all to say that during non-presidential primaries, voter turnout is not high, unfortunately. The idea behind ranked-choice voting was that you have more options. You're not stuck with someone, and to make it more engaging. What we're seeing now is that areas that have high voter turnout, continue to have high voter turnout, but in those areas that are hardest hit and that really are going to either thrive or drown post-pandemic, have not received that attention.

Brian: Yes, that's maybe the worst news that we've talked about today, and maybe the biggest as we come to near the end of the segment. David Cruz, and not to bury the lead, but Alvin Bragg wins the primary for Manhattan DA in his race against the number of other candidates. A major result that many people may have missed, because that also broke as the weekend was beginning.

It's not official-official, but what we do know is that his main competitor, Tali Farhadian Weinstein conceded, because she acknowledged that there was no remaining mathematical path to victory. This really does mean that Alvin Bragg will be the Democratic nominee for Manhattan DA. Why did Tali Farhadian Weinstein fall short, especially after she spent $8 million of her own money on final week campaigning?

David: I think that Weinstein essentially saw that the ballot count wasn't going her way, so she essentially put out a statement late Friday, basically conceding in the race. I would say that it's interesting that, yes, Farhadian Weinstein did pump in a fortune to try and win this race, whereas Bragg just didn't. To me, it just came to show that money doesn't always rule the day when it comes to winning these races. In fact, we're seeing that with some of these other council races as well, and borough president races, that money is not always a guaranteed path to victory.

Gwynne Hogan, my colleague, she did a fantastic job covering this race, and she really revealed a good chunk of information regarding failing Weinstein, that just simply did not seem to show that she essentially had the chops to really run that office. Looks like now Bragg, who's more of a pragmatic progressive, will run the office, and I'll be interested in seeing how he goes ahead and carries out the promises that he had put out on his campaign.

Brain: We'll talk more in the coming days, now that there's a result in that race, what kind of progressive prosecutor Alvin Bragg is promising to be. David Cruz from Gothamist, Josefa Velasquez from The City, thank you both so much for coming on with us here on the morning after the three-day weekend as, I'm sure, you're checking your email and your Twitter like every four seconds, to see if these absentee ballots are coming out, so I will be hearing from you later on. Thank you so much.

Josefa: Thanks, Brian.

David: Thank you.

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