Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
The city Board of Elections on Tuesday began manually counting ballots in a southeast Queens special election with big questions still unanswered about how voters’ selections will be tallied and disclosed under New York’s new ranked-choice system.
With ranking software yet to be authorized by the state, the start of adding up some 7,400 ballots cast for the City Council seat formerly held by Borough President Donovan Richards for the first round of ranking took all day.
Under ranked choice voting, launched this year, voters can list up to five candidates in order of preference. About 95,000 voters were eligible to cast ballots in the district, which covers parts of Southeast Queens and the Rockaways.
arrow In Queens: The BOE s first election to require multiple rounds of counting under the new ranked-choice voting system Brigid Bergin / Gothamist
In office space tucked into the hulking Metro Mall in Middle Village, dozens of Board of Elections employees, candidates, and observers made history Tuesday as they began to hand count ballots cast in the BOE s first election to require multiple rounds of counting under the new ranked-choice voting system. (This is the second time New York City has adopted a form of RCV, the first was in the 1930s.)
The additional tallies were triggered when no one candidate received more than 50% of the vote in the February 23rd special election for the 31st City Council district in Queens. Selvena Brooks-Powers led in the nine-candidate contest with just over 38% of the vote, followed by Pesach Osina who trailed her by only 207 votes.
This Election, You ll Rank Your Choices bushwickdaily.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bushwickdaily.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The 8-to-1 matching program is supposed to level the playing field and encourage campaigns to rely on small donors instead of big money and special interests.
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New York City Council Member Carlina Rivera, a leading contender to be the next Council speaker, is endorsing a slate of 13 women running for City Council this year. It’s the latest sign that Rivera is working to win support from colleagues to succeed current City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, who is term-limited out at the end of 2021.
Most of the endorsed candidates are women of color, and Rivera, who is Latina and from Manhattan, said the list “represents the diversity of representation we need in the Council – especially with the diminishing number of women over the last few terms, which is alarming.”