NYC Mayor/2021 Megathread

[Oryxslayer]

The real thing to note is if this results remains similar to the final total, then it suggests strong voter consolidation in the last few days when compared to polls. This is largely at the expense of Stinger (lol, no surprise) and Yang (also unsurprising, given the cross-endorsement). This matters because it means far, far, less votes will be lost to RCV dropoff.

[Oryxslayer]

Anyway, it's a lot easier to comment on coalitions now:

Adams: Nearly all black voters, other than the young and highly educated. A significant portion of Hispanic voters but not as dominant as among black voters. Orthodox Jews, but not ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Garcia: Middle and upper-income white liberal voters, especially over the age of 30, and conservative non-Jewish white voters (i.e., excluding all Orthodox Jews).
Wiley: Young, liberal, highly educated voters of all ethnicities but especially young white voters, and some other Hispanic voters.
Yang: Asian voters and ultra-Orthodox Jews and nobody else.

Can someone explain again why exactly Yang is dominating with ultra-Orthodox Jews?

He came out in strong support of Israel.

But I thought the ultra-Orthodox Jews were the ones least likely to be Zionist?

He got Rabbinic endorsements, so the community followed their lead. Stringer also got a few, which is why he's doing well in some Hasidic neighborhoods. Now why yang got those endorsements, probably because he courted the community early, especially on the Yeshiva issue.

[Oryxslayer]

I really with there was an attempt at an exit poll tonight. There's essentially two scenarios right now, and an exit would reveal which occurred. The consolidation of voters around the big three makes both options viable, since votes will be far less likely to get lost to transfers. Those scenarios are:

- Adams already has this simply on the basis of just his initial lead. Everyone will just get pittances from the minor candidates, and then he will get enough from Yang's Hasidim and Wiley's minorities to win.

- Most of Adams's support from transfers decided to rank him first through the process of late-game consolidation. He'll get Yang's Hasidim, but the weekend pact cemented an anti-Adams perception among supporters. When reallocation occurs, it will bring likely Garcia (off of Yang voters), but maybe Wiley enough support to pull ahead.

[Oryxslayer]

For those of us in late, what gets counted tonight and what doesn't?

This will be fun. How much info will we actually have by the end of the day today? I know counting will take forever, but what % of the reported vote could we expect by tomorrow morning?

All election day and early in-person first preferences will be known tonight. All absentees and other mail votes are not counted until June 29 as per NY law, which gives 1 week for ballots to arrive that were postmarked on or before Election Day. Voters are also given time to 'cure' their ballot in the event of any defects until July 9. June 29 is when there votes will be entered into the pool. They will start providing weekly updates on the full vote on July 6. Supposedly this puts July 12 as the day of reckoning since all votes will then be in the system. However, this assumes competence and priority on the part of NYC tabulators, and they have not demonstrated either in the past. NYC does have all the city council and borough races as will to enumerate. Checking back on the RCV special elections in the Bronx that happened earlier in the year, it appears that it is the first round votes that take the longest. Once the enumerators have every legal vote from within the time period, then they reallocate and this apparently goes very quickly through software. Allocation will be announced all at once, rather than by round.

[Oryxslayer]

I find it completely ridiculous how long it takes to count votes in some american states (especially when VBM is involved). Seriously, why doesn't every state do like Florida which typically has over 95% of votes counted within a few hours (even though it also has VBM)?

Every US election has a long, long, tail - but we never really care about it. This is for military and oversees ballots, curing, and the like. Of course that is less than 1% of the count, so it almost never matters. New York City has two issues. One: the state cannot count the mail ballots it has on hand on E-night. Other states that accept votes postmarked the day of election day allocate resources to cure and authenticate the ballot ahead of time, so then it can be fed into the machine on E-Night. Several western states for example run all-mail elections and have >99% done within 24 hours. Resources are allocated so that ballots which arrive quickly are counted in a timely manner. Almost all California ballots are processed within a week of poll closing, despite the size of the state and the month-long process for the stragglers. This is a NY issue and legislators have spoke about modernization.

The second issue of course is RCV, which all but requires every legal vote to be in before a winner can be declared. So we must wait for the handful of military and curable ballots before there is a final total.

[Oryxslayer]

Data For Progress, the pollster that more or less nailed the most important elections last week (mayor, comptroller and Manhattan DA) created an RCV simulation using election-day results.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/6/28/dfp-ranked-choice-simulations

Kathryn Garcia defeats Eric Adams 54-46 on the final ballot
Eric Adams defeated Maya Wiley 52-48 on the final ballot

Interesting. DFP isn't the best overall pollster - especially when it comes to areas with a significant rural contingent - but nobody can deny their ability to model Democratic primary electorates.

[Oryxslayer]

Data For Progress, the pollster that more or less nailed the most important elections last week (mayor, comptroller and Manhattan DA) created an RCV simulation using election-day results.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/6/28/dfp-ranked-choice-simulations

Kathryn Garcia defeats Eric Adams 54-46 on the final ballot
Eric Adams defeated Maya Wiley 52-48 on the final ballot

Very interesting - have to wonder how many of Yang's voters will rank Garcia higher than Wiley. I feel like that's ultimately going to decide what happens.

Yeah, DFP has Garcia dominating among Yang voters, winning about 60% against both Adams and wiley. I guess we'll see tomorrow night!

If this actually happens (Garcia overtaking Adams in the final round from 3rd place in the initial count), it will be "Stop the Steal" on steroids, rivaling the Florida 2000 level of controversy.

How? That’s how RCV works. Nothing fraudulent about it.

Of course. But people don't think past the headlines and Adams has a interest in raising distrust in the process - see the posts before polls closed last week for examples of this.

[Oryxslayer]

Yeah I think Garcia will win this based off what wed know about the absentees.

Also tight race between Lander and Johnson for Comptroller.

[Oryxslayer]

Credit to @Union_Tpke on twitter.

[Oryxslayer]

Wow, what a comeback. I guess Wasserman needs much more experience with RCV lol

Also, if Garcia pulls it out, Adams #StopTheSteal incoming. You heard it here first, folks.

In a similar vein to the previous post, I think we are all unprepared for the Trumpian manner Adams may conduct himself during these next few weeks. He has already displayed hints of it during the cross-endorsement, and the inevitable wanting period will only heighten everyone's nerves. Unless something shocking happens, Adams will win the first round votes counted tonight. We will however get an idea based on comparative turnout by neighborhood and RCV projections if he is in danger of losing that position on the final allocation. Adams has already attacked the RCV process and will likely continue to do so if the data is there for a final round loss. He also could try to claim some legitimacy from his first round victory as if it was the final contest, potentially through an incredibly premature victory party and speech tonight.

https://twitter.com/JonMIPol/status/1407327838861238275?s=20

[Oryxslayer]

Ok, so now I'm hearing there are a bunch of election day votes from the Bronx that haven't been counted yet for some reason? What is going on lol

If you're seeing this from the Wasserman tweet, he seems to have misunderstood. There were 140K votes from the Bronx that were uncounted last week. They are now counted and are included in this last update. Maybe. Still unsure.

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1409979509164679169?s=20

[Oryxslayer]

Looks like he got duped by the Bronx E-Day vote just like Wasserman. Those votes largely were good for him, so this isn't an obvious target to start your tantrum campaign.

[Oryxslayer]

NYT now has an exhaustion flowchart on their page.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/RebeccaKKatz/status/1409990721222873094

As noted earlier, DFP is has earned a strong reputation of accuracy in Democratic primaries. Denying this is foolish. In general elections, and in those geographies where there are more rural voters, they are less successful - but that does not matter here.

[Oryxslayer]

Ok wait the numbers seem completely f**ked.

https://twitter.com/aaronfoldenauer/status/1409976473977557003?s=20


Someone noted above that the minor candidates were having extremely high exhaust rates. If that’s caused by these phantom votes than they may actually not be factoring into the final round count, meaning the current final round is accurate. If not...oh boy.

Seems like that would just be typo - the second column seems to match the E-Night + the uncounted In Person votes we previously learned about. The rise in write-ins makes this possible, given that those votes take longer to process. But this is all guesswork.

[Oryxslayer]

Nobody's losing their job. These aren't even the results. It's instant runoff. You don't have anything until you have everything.

Hilariously, if NY had adequate voting laws, people would lose their jobs for lack of professionality. But NYC made it very clear that these were simply estimates without the absentees, - the count was always going to be corrected. So an emergency retabulation is nothing extraordinary.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/BenJ_Rosenblatt/status/1410064369573040130?s=20

[Oryxslayer]

Credit to Cinyc for the map. Basically, Wasserman earlier was banging his drum about a potential 100K uncounted vote, mainly in the Bronx. His most recent tweet references how turnout there is basically stagnant whereas it went up by over 10% (on 2013, the last competitive election) in other boroughs. However, he may have simply stumbled into a confluence of trends most prevalent in areas with large minority populations like the Bronx. These are:

- Off-cycle elections generally being biased in favor of higher-income and higher-education demographics.

- Perceived Partisan threats most impact those demographics already highly engaged, so the natural turnout increase from increasing polarization is unequal.

- More candidates directly appealing to said demographics, once again raising interest and turnout among different subsections of those populations, whereas Adams was the only horse in town for African Americans and certain Hispanic demographics.

- The exit of a percentage of Hispanics from the democratic primary electorate. These may be the partisan flippers who went GOP in November, or they may have just left the primary ecosystem because candidates don't appeal to them. However, this has been going on for a while. I first noticed it in summer 2020 when doing Texas primary analysis and saw how despite Presidential turnout surging - sometimes more than doubling because of partisanship, competition, and the large candidate pool - the Rio Grande counties barely moved and turnout barely increased. My theory was that conservative-but-didn't-vote-GOP-because-perceived-racism Hispanics are no longer in the pool of primary voters, leaving the resulting overall primary pool more to the left than previously.



In an unrelated note, the traditionally ultra Orthodox neighborhoods really stand out when it comes to turnout increases.

[Oryxslayer]

Dave is trying really hard to compensate for the fact that he thought Adams was going to win.

Seems to me that Dave is analyzing the data he has in front of him as well as ever. Not his fault the NYC BOE is such a clusterf—k. And Adams very well still could win. Anyone who says otherwise based on some extremely faulty and erroneously released data is kidding themselves.

Correct me if I'm wrong though, but wasn't the missing Bronx data included in yesterday's erroneous dump?

There was 142k ballots added. 135k were the dummy test ones, and 7K were reportedly those missing Bronx votes. So technically weren't they already added yesterday?

I’m assuming that this is the case, and people have been pointing this out to Dave but he hasn’t addressed it yet lol.

For reference, Cinyc created the previously posted map to show Dave that his assumption that there were 100Kish outstanding E-Day votes is faulty. The assumption might make sense purely from a topline perspective, but upon examination of the precinct data it looks more like Hispanic turnout rather than an undercount was a problem. It looks very likely that the 7K added yesterday alongside the dummies was the last E-Day votes. Dave however has kept huffing the Copium because he doesn't want to have to delete more tweets like he has already done.

https://twitter.com/cinyc9/status/1410106336029908997?s=20

[Oryxslayer]

If there is a bunch of uncounted ballots in the Bronx doesn't that likely mean Adams wins?

Yes. But there very likely isn't on the level he imagines. Dave is huffing Copium born from a misunderstanding of demographic turnouts and how said demographics dominate the Bronx. See the map for why this is happening. See the tweet on how many precincts remain uncounted (normal for NY), how they are equitably divided across the boroughs, and how the 7K added yesterday alongside the dummys are likely those remaining precincts.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1410292229202194436

Cinyc did a deep dive. A number of these precincts are the not fully counted ones - there's one AD in Bronx for instance with about 60% of precincts only partially counted. But a good number are also fully counted precincts just with less primary voters - generally Hispanic ones affected by the factors listed earlier. So when taken their total number vs the whole into consideration, when accounting for the fact these are partially counted rather than not counted, when accounting for the fact they are across the boroughs...there really isn't much here. Dave's hyping up what is in effect the 5% of precincts known by the BOE to be not finished counting on E-Night and reported on their site - see the Cinyc tweet. And it seems likely the 7K we know about are these missing votes.

[Oryxslayer]

Exactly these incompetently run elections undermine trust and confidence and make it seem like Trump's BS of election fraud may be sort of true. New York state and the city are a disgrace when it comes to managing elections properly. Not want to sound lecturing here, but sometimes I think you guys just should get out and let us Europeans run your elections. We don't have the issues.

Federalism gives power over election administration to states rather than the national government, whose authority in this department is over electoral regulations like the VRA. This leads to 50 similar yet different sets of election laws. Responsibility for counting however is not on the states, like a national body, but on local authorities and counties. These local authorities each can have different voting machines, ballot structure, and enumeration schedules. The advantages of a dispersed rather than centralized election system are that it is nearly invulnerable to direct outside influence - because of the multitude of various systems - and because there is no central electoral body to politicize, there is not threat of that institution being captured and ballot boxes getting stuffed from the top down a la Turkey. The downsides are that individual localities are on their own, which could lead to local machines like what once existed in NY and Chicago, and that local governments lack the resources of a central administration to maximize efficiency.

Within these circumstances, importing election administrators would do nothing. The people who volunteer are trying their hardest - as they often let you know via social media. They are however operating within a dispersed system that prioritizes local ability to do what they want over efficiency.

[Oryxslayer]

Exactly these incompetently run elections undermine trust and confidence and make it seem like Trump's BS of election fraud may be sort of true. New York state and the city are a disgrace when it comes to managing elections properly. Not want to sound lecturing here, but sometimes I think you guys just should get out and let us Europeans run your elections. We don't have the issues.

Pretty much this. I've read some people claim that it shouldn't matter how long votes take to be counted so long as the results are accurate but by that logic, even months or years of counting would be A-OK.

For me, the worst thing part about this process is the whole July 12 deadline for counting absentees. That is so ridiculous. Every measure should be taken so as to ensure that ballots (including absentees) are ready to be counted by election night or less than 48 hours later (with the possible exception of military/overseas ballots due to their very special circumstances).

Yes. The ignoring incompetency, a lot of NY's issues stem from the fact that they cannot touch their absentee/mail votes because of an outdated law that Cuomo's allies refuse to change. We can perpetually argue over whether a ballot postmarked on E-Day should be accepted or not, but the fact that NY cannot count votes that had in their possession on election night is trash. Other states that due allow postmarks count their absentees on hand within 24 hours of election night, and this is the vast majority of overall absentees.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/BenJ_Rosenblatt/status/1410360153380118529?s=20

Arguably the bigger contests for ideological crusaders of various stripes, given that the mayoral race is more a factionalized parliamentary struggle.

[Oryxslayer]

https://twitter.com/BOENYC/status/1410695822811992065?s=20

There is now a tentative plan to release them tomorrow, but no absolute guarantee. If it means they don't screw up again then we should be happy to wait.