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A prominent city councilman and supporter of leading Democratic mayoral candidate Eric Adams on Wednesday accused primary rivals Kathryn Garcia, Maya Wiley and Andrew Yang of exploiting the city’s new ranked-choice voting system to devalue the ballots of black and Latino New Yorkers.
Councilman I. Daneek Miller — a Queens Democrat who co-chairs the council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus — also bemoaned the “cumbersome process of waiting” for the final results, not slated to be released until weeks after the primary.
“Let me add my voice to the chorus of those disappointed that the candidate who consistently polled as having the largest share of black and Latino voters was attacked this weekend by a ranked-choice voting alliance of three candidates with the largest share of white voters,” said Miller in a statement, referring respectively to Adams and the trio of Garcia, Wiley and Yang.
“At best, it was bad optics of a coalition of candidates who purport to believe that ranked-choice voting might create a more inclusionary democracy.”
Adams, a former NYPD captain and the Brooklyn borough president, previously ripped former Department of Sanitation head Garcia and businessman-turned-pol Yang for jointly campaigning on Juneteenth.
“That last-minute attempt to derail me on June 19!” said Adams, who is black, at the time. “While we were celebrating liberation and freedom from enslavement, they sent a message, and I thought it was the wrong message.”
Adams had a primary base largely concentrated in black and working-class neighborhoods, while Garcia and Yang, who are respectively white and Asian, were more popular among white voters.
His criticism did not extend to Wiley, who is also black and did not jointly campaign with any other candidate.
The campaigns of Garcia, Wiley and Yang did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Miller’s remarks.
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Miller went on to criticize the long wait New Yorkers are in for before they find out who actually won the primary, in which Adams has a healthy lead based on first-choice votes.
“For now, the cumbersome process of waiting for the results of a ranked-choice voting election has begun,” he said. “The Board of Elections is telling us that we are two weeks away from having a preliminary breakdown of final ranked voting results, adding to questions about the software being utilized to count the ballots, having been approved less than a month prior to implementation.
“New Yorkers deserve a chance to weigh in on whether they find this acceptable, and if ranked-choice voting and the confusion it has spurred is eroding their confidence in our democracy.”
Ranked-choice voting was overwhelmingly approved by city voters in a 2019 referendum, and was used for the first time in this year’s primary.
The Black, Latino and Asian Caucus previously pushed to delay the system’s implementation — and six councilmembers, including Miller, went to court over the issue — but their efforts were in vain.
Susan Lerner, of the good-government group Common Cause, said that Miller’s concerns were misplaced, noting that under the previous system voters would still be waiting weeks to know the Democratic mayoral candidate — just with the added annoyance and cost of a runoff election.
“If the system that Mr. Miller wants to continue to champion were in place, we wouldn’t have the results,” she said. “We’d be waiting two or three weeks for a runoff and it would cost the taxpayers up to $15 million just for the administration costs for that election.
“We have saved time and money with [ranked-choice voting].”
Lerner noted that the Board of Elections is compelled by state law to wait for absentee ballots to trickle in after primary day, and to give voters a chance to correct errors on their ballots.
“They’re bound by state law that says you have to wait seven days after the election to get all of the absentee ballots in,” she said. “It’s state law that says you have to give any voter [whose ballot has a] curable mistake seven business days to cure that error and not be disenfranchised.”
“What is the board supposed to do there that they’re not doing?”
The BOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lerner also pushed back on Miller’s claims that the system allowed for minority votes to be diminished.
“As far as we can tell either anecdotally or with our survey results from the special election, there’s no basis in fact” for the accusation, she said. “It’s simply some unfounded fears that are probably politically-driven.”