Rep. Carolyn Maloney will serve a 15th term in Congress after beating challenger Suraj Patel in their closer-than-expected New York City district Democratic primary.
Maloney, 74, held a narrow 648-vote advantage on attorney Patel, 36, after ballots cast in person were tallied on the night of their June 23 contest, 41% to 40%. But with more than 50% of the vote being cast by mailed-in absentee ballots, the final results were delayed until counting began on the week of July 6.
The New York State Board of Elections certified Maloney as the winner seven weeks later on Tuesday.
Maloney had earlier claimed victory by 3,700 votes on July 29 before official results were available. Patel didn’t concede either, calling the “massive and disproportionate irregularities” in tabulating ballots “a systematic disenfranchisement of thousands of voters” after the board was sued in federal court.
In a statement, Patel said the board mailed more than 33,000 ballots in New York City on June 22, “knowing there was no chance that voters could vote on time by June 23.” It also tossed out 12,500 ballots with missing signatures, no postmarks, or postmarks on June 24, he added.
“This election is a canary in the coal mine for November. As Democrats, we must be on the side of the voter. We can’t set a dangerous precedent for Donald Trump to attack vote by mail and conflate disenfranchisement with his goal of voter suppression. We hope the court or New York elected officials will re-enfranchise thousands of New Yorkers rather than cast their voices aside,” Patel wrote in a statement.
U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres this week ordered for the invalidated ballots to be included in the tally.
“We should be concerned that the State of New York spent taxpayer dollars in court arguing that counting votes validly cast but received without a postmark through no fault of the voter was ‘not in the public interest’ and was not purposeful as to deserve a remedy. But a federal judge disagreed, writing in her opinion, ‘The Constitution is not so toothless,'” Patel wrote on Monday.
Maloney’s win means House Democrats avoid embarrassing defeats for two of its top members. Maloney’s colleague Rep. Eliot Engel wasn’t so lucky. The 31-year incumbent and House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, who has represented northern Bronx and southern Westchester County since 1988, lost his primary against insurgent Jamaal Bowman. Maloney has led the House Oversight Committee since Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings’s death last October.
Maloney and Patel’s match-up was a reprisal of their 2018 bout, in which Maloney earned 60% of the vote to Patel’s 40%. The majority of Maloney’s support came from wealthy East Manhattan, as opposed to the other younger parts of New York’s 12th Congressional District in Brooklyn and Queens. Most of the outstanding ballots in 2020 were from Manhattan.
Maloney, who was first elected to Congress in 1992, didn’t go easy on Patel, who ran without the backing of progressive groups, such as Justice Democrats. In a digital ad, she accused Patel of being “creepy” in a 2012 Facebook post about being attracted to then-16-year-old Olympic gymnast McKayla Maroney. Patel filed a House Ethics Committee complaint, calling Maloney out for pushing “a racist trope.” He also criticized Maloney for questioning whether vaccines had any connection to autism.
