Voting Ends in New York City's Mayoral Primary - but It May Take Weeks to Find Out the Winner

Michael M. Santiago/Getty; Roy Rochlin/Getty; Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty; Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty From left: Andrew Yang, Kathryn Garcia, Eric Adams and Maya Wiley

The polls have closed in Tuesday's contentious Democratic primary in the New York City mayoral race - and even as the unofficial early results led to a shakeup in the race, the final results may not be known for weeks.

That's in large part because the city used ranked-choice voting for the first time ever with this month's primary election, which had voters rank their top five mayoral candidates, out of a field of 13, in order of preference.

As of Wednesday, according to an ongoing count compiled by The New York Times, it appears none of the candidates will win an outright majority of votes.

The Times reports that if no one gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the rankings come into play. Under the city's new ranked-choice system, which was approved by voters in 2019, a second round of counting will then begin. In that round, the last-place candidate will be eliminated and the voters who picked that candidate will instead have their second choice counted.

The process will repeat, with the lowest-ranking candidates being progressively elminiated, until one candidate receives more than 50 percent of the votes.

Polling had appeared uncertain in the weeks running up to the all-important Democratic primary, which will likely determine the Democratic-leaning city's next mayor come the November general election.

PEOPLE recently profiled each of the top four candidates: Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, Andrew Yang and Maya Wiley.

Following Tuesday's voting, Yang quickly conceded the race as the incoming returns showed him behind the other three.

Adams was leading, with Wiley and Garcia behind.

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Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty New York City mayoral primary

In the final weeks, Garcia, the city's 51-year-old former sanitation commissioner, appeared to be challenging Adams, the 60-year-old Brooklyn Borough president, for the primary's top spot along with Wiley, 57, a prominent civil rights attorney and, like Garcia, a former staffer in the de Blasio administration.

Yang and Garcia had, unusually, campaigned together in the final days of the election, asking voters to rank them No. 1 and No. 2 on their ballots. That led to Adams accusing his opponents of trying to stop him from becoming elected because he is Black.

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"For them to come together like they are doing in the last three days, they're saying we can't trust a person of color to be the mayor of the City of New York when this city is overwhelmingly people of color," Adams said, according to the Times.

Yang responded by pointing out he is Asian-American, while Garcia, who is white, has repeatedly pointed to her background growing up in a mixed-race household throughout the campaign.

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty New York City mayoral primary

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The Times reports that the biggest issue voters cared about in this month's election was public safety - something Adams, a former police officer, spotlighted.

He told PEOPLE he joined the police force to combat racial injustice from the inside after he was beaten by a N.Y.C officer when he was a teen. "The next mayor really must be someone who has gone through a lot, so they can help people who are going through a lot," Adams said.

But learning who voters wound up choosing may take up to three weeks, according to the Times. The newspaper reports that the winner of Tuesday's primary election may not be clear until the week of July 12.

That's because, according to the Times, the New York City Board of Elections will unveil each round of the ranked-choice voting results week-by-week until the winner is determined.

"The one thing that New Yorkers don't have is patience," Garcia told PEOPLE recently, warning, "The counting of this is going to take a little bit of time."

The winner of Tuesday's primary will become the Democratic nominee for mayor in the November election.

The Republican primary was won by Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the nonprofit Guardian Angels organization, over entrepreneur Fernando Mateo.