#Mail-in ballots surpass in-person votes in Maloney race, Engel still won’t concede

The city Board of Elections has already received more absentee ballots to decide the nail-biting Democratic primary race between veteran Rep. Carolyn Maloney and rival Suraj Patel than from constituents who voted in person, according to data posted Monday.

Thus far, the board has received 43,621 mail-in ballots from voters in the 12th Congressional District that includes Manhattan’s East Side, Astoria and Long Island City in Queens and Greenpoint in Brooklyn.

Of that total, 31,344 mail-in votes came from Manhattan’s East Side, 8,374 came from Queens and 3,903 from Brooklyn.

And more absentee ballots filed during the coronavirus pandemic primary are likely still in the mail.

A total of 109,000 Democrats requested an absentee ballot in the 12th CD – with the majority, more than 79,000, coming from Manhattan East Siders. That doesn’t mean all of them followed through to vote by mail.

By comparison, 39,635 constituents voted in person on primary day and through nine days of early voting, according to the unofficial machine count recorded with the Board of Election.

Maloney held a slim 648 vote lead from in-person voters with 98 percent of precincts reporting – with 16,473 votes to 15,825 for Patel.

She’s ahead by just 1.5 percentage points.

Candidates Lauren Ashcraft garnered 5,260 votes or 13 percent of the vote and Peter Harrison received 1,933 or 5 percent of the vote.

Maloney, 74, first elected in 1992, declared victory after claiming that her lead will increase substantially when the mail-in votes are counted.

Maloney carried her Manhattan East Side turf she has long represented by 2,553 votes – 12,211 votes to 9,633 votes for Patel.

But Patel, 36, a hotel magnate who worked for former President Barack Obama, easily carried the Western Queens and Brooklyn portions of the district with more younger voters – but not by enough to overcome Maloney’s cushion in Manhattan.

But he said he had his campaign conducted a robust mail-in ballot operation and held out hope of erasing the deficit when all the ballots are counted.

Meanwhile in the 16th Congressional District, embattled veteran Rep. Eliot Engel has a steep — perhaps insurmountable to overcome with absentee ballots — deficit to insurgent Jamaal Bowman, a former Bronx middle school principal.

The 16th CD covers portions of the northern Bronx and Westchester.

Bowman, who has declared victory, won the machine vote over Engel in a 58 percent to 35 percent shellacking. Bowman took 25,863 votes to Engel’s 15,680 votes – a 10,183 vote lead.

Bowman won the Bronx portion of the district with 62 percent of the vote and the Westchester side with 56 percent over Engel, first elected to Congress in 1988. Engel has not conceded and is waiting for all the votes to be counted.

The city elections agency received 10,710 absentee ballots from Bronx voters in the 16th CD. It’s unclear how many mail-in votes were collected thus far by the Westchester Board of Elections.