We might not know who won the Manhattan City Council special election till next week

The hotly contested race to succeed former New York City Council Member Erik Bottcher for his Manhattan seat will come to a head Tuesday – just don’t bet on getting an immediate answer on who will emerge victorious. 

If nobody gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round of ranked choice voting, results might not be clear until May 5th – a week after the April 28 special election. That’s because the Board of Elections needs time to collect the ballots from the voting machines as well as any additional ballots that come in by mail during the week, according to Vincent Ignizio, deputy executive director and spokesperson for BOE. Come next Tuesday, the board will run a full RCV breakdown.

Four candidates are fighting to represent Manhattan’s West Side after Bottcher, one of the city’s most well-known gay leaders, won a state Senate seat last year and vacated his position representing the Council District 3 Public interest has steadily mounted as the special election has spurred debate about the importance of identity in a part of the city that’s long been represented by an LGBTQ+ elected – and as it’s devolved into a battle between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin. 

The city’s two most powerful elected officials are backing two different candidates, intensifying the race’s drama. While Menin joined Bottcher in endorsing his former chief of staff Carl Wilson, who is gay, Mamdani is backing Lindsey Boylan, a former gubernatorial aide who became the first woman to accuse former Gov. Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment. 

The race has gotten heated.  Some LGBTQ+ leaders have criticized the mayor for endorsing Boylan, who is straight, pointing to the district’s history having been intentionally drawn to bolster queer representation in Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea and the West Village. And the New York Post wrote about Boylan’s $6 million Westchester County mansion and recent adoption of anti-Israel politics. 

Meanwhile, a super PAC with ties to allies of the former governor has spent at least$144,000 against Boylan and in support of Wilson since last week alone New York Focus reported. Mamdani said on X it was Cuomo’s biggest donors trying to stop her. Wilson’s also been boosted by super PACs for the Carpenters union and the United Federation of Teachers. 

Community Board 4 Chair Leslie Boghosian Murphy and Layla Law-Gisiko, a Democratic District Leader who’s opposed building new housing in the district, are also running for the seat. While Wilson has support from labor unions and several local elected officials, the other three candidates have earned votes before. Boylan won 12% in the district in the 2021 primary for Manhattan borough president. Boghosian Murphy won 14% in the 2021 council primary. And Law-Gisiko finished second with 27% of the vote in the 2022 Assembly primary in an overlapping district.

City Council Member Harvey Epstein, who also recently won a Manhattan seat in a special election, said he expects none of the candidates to break the necessary 50% of first-ranked votes needed to secure victory with ranked choice voting. While Mamdani’s involvement in the race is likely to bolster turnout to some extent, special elections are notorious for not garnering much participation. RCV only further complicates things. 

“Races with ranked choice voting are always interesting, because you don’t know how things will work out if nobody hits 50%,” Epstein said. “The question really is ‘who’s the last person, who do people rank?’”

The candidate with the most first-ranked votes wins the race roughly 94% of the time, but come-from-behind victories do happen, like with Council Members David Carr and Shekar Krishnan in 2021. And in a race like this one with no cross-endorsements, it’s harder to predict where ranked votes will get redistributed.

Adding urgency to the contest is the fact that the outcome of the race could play a deciding role in whether or not Menin is able to override Mamdani’s recent veto of a piece of legislation directing the police department to create and publicize plans to deploy security perimeters around educational facilities during protests. To do so, she’d need at least four additional council members to support the measure. While Boylan, Law-Gisiko and Murphy all said they would vote against overriding the mayor’s veto, Wilson has said he would vote to overturn it.