The ballots are examined and counted | AP photo
ALBANY – Don’t hold your breath waiting for the final results in the Congressional and Assembly primaries in New York City.
The process of counting absentee ballots will not begin in another week, New York City Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan announced at the end of a board meeting Tuesday afternoon.
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The delay means the results will not be official anytime soon in the closely watched House primaries, in which Jamaal Bowman appears to have defeated incumbent representative Eliot Engel in New York’s 16th congressional district. Similarly, in the race between another longtime incumbent, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and her challenger, Suraj Patel, in the 12th Congressional District.
Results in various seats of the State Assembly will be similarly delayed.
Staten Island will begin counting votes on Monday and the remaining four districts will begin on July 8, Ryan said.
The city board, like its statewide counterparts, has been inundated with an unprecedented volume of absentee ballots and is currently working to sort them. Final totals for the number of mail-in ballots should be available later this week. Ryan said “more than 10 times” the expected number of ballots had been mailed under normal circumstances.
“Our staff in the municipalities is working diligently to organize this entire document so that, when the process begins, it begins in an orderly manner,” Ryan said. “If we have to sacrifice speed for precision, we will always be wrong on the precision side and we will not give in to the pressure to speed things up. Because speeding things up can lead to mistakes and mistakes lead to undermining confidence in the electoral process and perhaps to an unfair result. ”
