Maya Wiley says NYC mayoral race ‘wide open’ after unofficial results dump
Maya’s still in the mix. Just ask her.
New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Maya Wiley declared her bid plenty alive on Thursday, a day after the release of partial ranked-choice election results that showed her within striking distance of Kathryn Garcia in the second-to-last round.
“I am excited that it is a wide open race,” Wiley, a former counsel to Mayor de Blasio, said in a news conference outside City Hall. “The people will speak, and they have spoken, we just need to know what they said.”
The incomplete Democratic primary data dump from the error-prone Board of Elections showed Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, losing to Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams by 2.2% in the final round.
On Thursday, Wiley appeared intent on prying some focus away from the pair — and on highlighting the unsettled nature of the race with more than 100,000 absentee ballots still uncounted.
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“Let’s really be very clear with all New Yorkers: We don’t have any official count,” she told reporters. “That is the most important thing.”
In the current ranked-choice results, Wiley falls by a paper-thin margin — just 347 votes – to Garcia in the eighth round. Garcia, boosted by her wide appeal, then nearly knocks off Adams, falling by 14,755 votes in the last round.
The mountain of uncounted mail-in ballots could reconfigure the results, and the Board of Elections’ decision to release a round-by-round analysis with a missing pile of votes has drawn loud criticism.
The Board of Elections further muddled the picture on Tuesday, when it released inaccurate results that included roughly 135,000 “test” ballots. The Elections Board turned out corrected results on Wednesday.
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Questioned about the rollout, Wiley gently chided the agency on Thursday.
“If it was up to me, and it’s not, I would have counted all the ballots before announcing anything,” she said.
She declined to say whether she would follow in Adams’ footsteps and file a preliminary lawsuit to preserve her right to have a judge review ballots in the race.
Dodging questions from the press, Wiley avoided bold pronouncements in the news conference, instead largely sticking to a simple message she tweeted in gif form on Wednesday: “I’m still here.”
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