New York City will re-do its first rounds of ranked-choice voting after accidentally including 135,000 test votes in official results

• New York City officials accidentally included 135,000 test votes in their ranked-choice vote tallies.
• The Board of Elections announced it will re-upload, re-tally, and re-tabulate votes on Wednesday.
• New York City is using ranked-choice voting for the first time for mayoral and other races.

New York City officials are re-doing the first rounds of ranked-choice vote tabulations for the city’s mayoral, borough-wide, and council elections after mistakenly including 135,000 test votes in their election data reporting system used to relay results to the public.

The city’s Board of Elections announced in a Tuesday night statement that “ballot images used for testing were not cleared from the Election Management System” used for reporting and tallying the results of ranked-choice votes.

—NYC Board of Elections (@BOENYC) June 30, 2021

The Board plans to remove the dummy test votes from the cast vote record, re-upload election night results, re-generate the cast vote record, and then re-run ranked-choice rounds.

Unofficial, unranked election night results from only early and Election Day in-person votes showed Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams in the lead, followed by New York City Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia and civil rights attorney Maya Wiley. Over 120,000 absentee ballots cast in the Democratic primary have yet to be counted and tabulated.