There was no dominant winner in the race to replace former City Councilmember and now Queens Borough President, Donovan Richards, opening the door to the next round in ranked-choice voting, the new method all New York City voters will use to pick their leaders going forward.
The vote in Council District 31 — the lines of which go from the Rockaway Peninsula and then jump the water to the inland neighborhoods of Laurelton, Rosedale and Springfield Gardens in southeast Queens — were split mostly between two candidates. Selvena Brooks-Powers received 38% of the vote while Pesach Osina trailed her by only 207 votes, garnering about 35% of the vote. Manny Silva came in third with about 10% of the vote.
They were competing for support of more than 100,000 people who are registered to vote, but only 6,863 of those actually cast a ballot. The Board of Elections said it would not begin counting votes until March 10th, two days after the deadline for all military ballots to arrive.
The new voting process means that the candidate who came in last will be eliminated and the BOE will count those voters’ second preference for the Council seat. If a candidate still doesn’t receive more than 50% of the vote, the process of elimination and reallocation of votes will continue until someone wins a majority.
According to a recent poll, roughly a third of New Yorkers have never heard of Ranked-Choice Voting, and 88% said they’d heard only a little about it. Even though voters can select up to 5 candidates, questions remain about how many actually did so, versus bullet-voting (where voters choose only one candidate on a ranked-choice voting ballot).
One key to winning in a ranked-choice election could also be being many people’s second choice. For Power, whose roots are in Southeast Queens, that means appealing to voters on the peninsula portion of the district.
She has the advantage already of endorsements from powerful politicians such as Congressman Gregory Meeks (chairperson of the Queens County Democratic Party) and Richards, who endorsed her over his former chief of staff, Manuel Silva, who came in a distant third.
Powers was once the communications director for SEIU, a large union. She’s been endorsed by their local branches that represent both doormen and maintenance workers as well as healthcare workers. A lack of hospitals in the district has been among her major talking points.
“While there was substantial confusion about Ranked-Choice Voting, these early results are promising and I look forward to all of the votes being counted, “ she said in a statement following the results of the election.
Her leading opponent, Pesach Osina, has a strong following among the Orthodox Jewish Community in Far Rockaway, a group that often votes as a bloc. But, according to local Queens pundits, Osina has established relationships with other communities in his years as a local activist. His second run for the seat, Osina came close to beating Richards in 2013.
The Board of Elections did not say how long it would take to count this next round of votes.
Earlier this year there was another ranked-choice voting election, in District 24, but because one candidate's lead made it nearly impossible for him to dip below the majority threshold, it wasn't much of a test of the system.
