Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on today's show, Nicole Jelineas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute,

a longtime contributing editor of City Journal, and a consummate expert on all things New York City.

Today we're going to turn to Nicole to help us make sense of the New York City primary elections that were held last week, but seem nowhere close to a final result.

Nicole, thanks for joining us today.

Good morning, Brian.

Nice to be on with you.

And yes, I'm not sure that we're going to make sense of them.

I guess maybe we'll make sense of why they don't make sense.

Right. That's the best we can do, I think, at this point. So last Tuesday was primary day in New York, for those who were listening who aren't in New York, and all eyes were on the mayoral race. But thanks to a combination of absentee voting and the city's new ranked choice voting system, we don't know who the Democratic nominee and presumptive next mayor will be.

We waited a week for the release of the preliminary rank choice results, and now we still don't know.

So the initial result showed Eric Adams holding double-digit leads over the two closest contenders,

Maya Wiley and Catherine Garcia.

Yesterday afternoon, though, when the city dropped the first batch of ranked choice results,

the race seemingly tightened quite a bit, and now Adams has a much narrower lead over Garcia,

who was in second place. But there were serious discrepancies with the tally.

Hours later, the Board of Elections just withdrew them, citing apparently a software

error that counted test ballots as real ones, if I'm understanding it correctly. So, you know,

rank choice voting has its advocates. We've been writing a bit about it in City Journal,

but it's really tough to see how this rollout

of this new system could have gone worse.

Could you just explain for people who might not be following this that closely what the

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