Nothing left to do but wait: Candidates hang tight as BOE prepares to count ballots

The Board of Elections doesn’t expect to certify election results before July 12. In the meantime, the candidates in close races are figuring out what to do with their time.  AP file photo by Richard Drew

By Jacob Kaye

It’s a weird time for a handful of Queens City Council candidates.

A little more than half of the borough’s 15 races for the legislative body are far from decided. While each race has a leader, the Board of Elections count is preliminary and only includes in-person ballots.

Absentee and affidavit ballots will likely change the make-up of each race, not to mention the ensuing ranked-choice voting count, which will shift ballots from one candidate to another and then again to another when the tabulation begins.

For now, candidates in the lead, but with less than 50 percent of the vote, can’t confidently claim victory, and candidates in second, third or, in some cases, fourth place, can’t quite concede.

While the BOE expects to release updated tabulations in the coming weeks, the final certified count of each race won’t be known until July 12, at the earliest, according to the agency.

Until then, candidates told the Eagle they’re taking it easy, not reading too much into the preliminary results, while also making preparations for what is going to be an unprecedented upcoming month.

“I'm going to wait for the results,” said Lynn Schulman, who’s leading the District 29 race by a little more than one percentage point. “The campaign was long and also was very challenging, in terms of COVID and all of that. And so I'm looking forward to the results.”

Schulman said she’s taken the immediate days following last Tuesday’s primary to catch up on some sleep – a sentiment echoed by a handful of other candidates – and that she expects to go back to work while she waits.

The Forest Hills resident said that while she’s not concerned about the BOE’s tabulation process – the agency will be using new software that was only recently approved to count the ballots – she does wish that these three weeks between Election Day and the results were also treated as part of the campaign.

“Spending ended on the 22nd, so you really can't spend any more money for the primary beyond that,” she said. “I think the Campaign Finance Board needs to rethink that position and extend that out, considering that [the campaign] effort has moved beyond the end of Primary Day.”

Other candidates agree – while the campaign proper is over, it still exists in some form until the results are certified.

“That's the part that's the strangest, I think,” said Felicia Singh, a candidate in District 32 who is leading the pack of six candidates by a little less than 2 percentage points. “Because you're so dependent on data [during the campaign], and now it’s just hope.”

Singh said she’s also used the time off to rest a little but has also focused on diving back into the data and figuring out how she and her campaign could shore up a victory even though ultimately, the results are now out of her hands.

She’s also used the time to protect her campaign and ballots in her favor legally. Several candidates in District 32, including Michael Scala who currently sits a very close second place in the race, successfully challenged many of the candidates petitions early in the race.

“We are going to do everything we can to protect the ballots because what we've seen in the petitioning process, the threatening of signatures, I know that'll happen with a threat of taking away votes,” she said. “We're gonna do something to protect voter rights, to whatever extent we can.”

Candidates are training their staff on how to observe the BOE’s ballot tabulation and preparing legal protections should any ballots in their favor be challenged.

“One of the most important things over the next three weeks is to ensure that the Board of Elections is doing its job,” said Amit Singh Bagga, a candidate currently in second place in District 26. “One of the most important tasks that all campaigns have over the course of the next several weeks is to make sure that the process of going through the ranked choice elimination, as well as the process of counting absentee ballots, is done correctly, with transparency and in a legal and ethical manner.”

Some candidates, even those who are running for the first time, don’t feel that the introduction of ranked-choice voting has made much of a difference in the days following in-person voting.

“This is a crazy race with a lot of opponents – a lot to keep track of – and we’re taking the time to reset ourselves,” said Eugene Noah, the campaign manager for Julie Won, who leads Amit Singh Bagga by less than a percentage point in District 26. “This isn’t really any different than if we were to have had certified results immediately, because we would have had to wait for absentee counts anyway, being that margins are this close.”

For now, all there’s left to do is wait.

“[The campaign] is hanging tight,” Noah said. “[There’s not] much we can do to affect the outcome.”

Additional reporting by Rachel Vick.