Voters casting their ballots in the June 27 primary election at Harlem’s Drew Hamilton Community Center located at located at 220 143rd between 7th and 8th Aves.
Photo by Sarah Belle Lin
Where are the voters?
Turnout continued to be low for Tuesday’s primary elections, with only 39,292 New Yorkers turning out to the polls by 10 a.m. in races for City Council, Bronx and Queens district attorney and several judgeships, according to unofficial city Board of Elections (BOE) counts posted at noon.
Manhattan accounted for 8,871 of those check-ins, coming behind Queens with 12,368 and Brooklyn with 11,587. The Bronx had the least with 6,457 check-ins. And Staten Island has no contests in this primary.
The nearly 40,000 voters who’ve checked-in at the polls Tuesday morning is only a few thousand less than the number of people who voted in-person during the nine days of early voting that took place over the past week, which saw just 44,611 at poll sites across the five boroughs. That brings the total number of BOE check-ins so far to 83,903, or about 2.3% of the city’s roughly 3.6 million registered Democratic and Republican voters.
The low turnout thus far was not unexpected and is likely due to this being an off-year election for the City Council, with all 51 seats of which are up for reelection just two years after the last cycle in 2021, due to last year’s redrawing of the body’s district maps. City Council elections are usually held every four years. However, Tuesday’s primary featured contests for about a third of the City Council seats, with uncontested incumbents and party nominees automatically moving on to the November general election.
Also likely adding to the low number of voters showing up to vote is a lack of citywide, statewide and federal elections on this year’s ballot.
This is only the second election cycle that the city is using the relatively new ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, where voters get to rank up to five candidates in…
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