NYC news outlets today are letting voters know they may need a little bit of patience to get results from the primary. The City’s board of elections has a helpful explainer on why. First-choice results can be tabulated right away. But if no candidate gets a majority in the first round, the last-place candidate is eliminated with redistribution of their supporters’ votes — and the city needs to know who’s in last place before doing that calculation. Which means waiting for all the ballots (including mail ballots and provisional ballots) to come in.
(UPDATE: it’d still be possible to release preliminary tentative rolling totals of both first-round and ultimate conclusion, clearly marked as preliminary, to show that the first-round total might well be misleading. And for practical purposes, the fact that there’s no “sore-loser law” in the city’s elections may mean that the primary isn’t really over until the fall.)
Also, while I’m highlighting explainers: CNN has an interactive ranked-choice primer using ice cream (perhaps to help New Yorkers beat the heat today).
And the Forward wonders whether Larry David’s to thank for the New York law that will allow people to hand out water to voters waiting on line in the heat.
