Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani cemented his lead in the mayoral primary election, securing a majority of the vote after just two rounds of ranked choice tabulations, according to the Board of Elections Tuesday.
The BOE first eliminated votes for write-in candidates, redistributing any ranked choices to the candidates on the ballot. Then in the next round it eliminated all other candidates besides Mamdani and Cuomo, with Mamdani emerging as the clear winner with 56%, or a total of 545,334 votes.
Cuomo ultimately receiving 44% of votes, or 428,530 votes. And 53,534 ballots were exhausted, meaning voters had ranked neither Mamdani nor Cuomo.
The BOE ran through every ranked-choice decision on the more than 900,000 ballots cast, eliminating all the candidates who were not Mamdani or Cuomo as a batch, including city Comptroller Brad Lander, who came in third with 11.2%. That’s because those candidates’ combined vote total in the first round was less than the first round total for Cuomo, who finished in second.
In ranked choice elections, voters may choose up to five candidates in order of preference. The candidates with the fewest votes in a round get eliminated, and if a voter ranked any of those candidates first on the ballot, the vote gets transferred to the next highest-ranked candidate, and so on.
To win, a single candidate must reach more than 50% of votes.
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Author: Dillon B
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