The counting of absentee ballots following Primary Day won’t begin until Monday at the earliest, the city Board of Elections announced Tuesday.
The process won’t start until next Wednesday in the boroughs with close House primaries.
The canvassing of paper ballots had been expected to begin tomorrow, the day after the deadline for mailed absentee votes to reach Board of Elections offices.
With an unprecedented number of voters opting to make their choices by mail amid the coronavirus crisis, the results of some primaries are still up in the air.
Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney leads her Democratic challenger Suraj Patel by only about 650 in-person votes.
But there’s more absentee ballots returned in the Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens district than in-person vote casts on Primary Day and in early voting.
And Congressman Eliot Engel has yet to concede in the Bronx and Westchester County, calling for every absentee vote to be counted. His challenger Jamaal Bowman received 59 percent of in-person votes while Engel got 36 percent.
Elections workers are set to begin counting absentee ballots in Staten Island on Monday and in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx on Wednesday.
City Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan at a commissioners’ meeting today said the borough offices are organizing the paper ballots.
“If we have to sacrifice speed for accuracy, we will always err on the side of accuracy and not give in to the pressure to speed things up,” he said. “Because speeding things up can lead to errors and errors lead to undermining of confidence in the elections process and perhaps an unfair result.”