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NYC Mayoral Election 2021

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The city’s bumbling Board of Elections said Wednesday that Eric Adams maintained his lead in the city’s Democratic mayoral primary — one day after officials threw the race into chaos with a botched count.

Preliminary results posted on the embattled election agency’s website showed Adams narrowly ahead of Kathryn Garcia, 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent.

In an ironic twist, the outcome was nearly the same as reported Tuesday, when Garcia overtook Maya Wiley to vault into second place pending the counting of absentee ballots.

The new numbers were released after the BOE on Tuesday posted — and later took down — its tallies of 11 rounds of in-person and early voting in the city’s first ranked-choice election.

In a public apology late Tuesday night, the BOE said those results included a test run of 135,000 fake votes that weren’t cleared from its computer system.

The error marked the latest in a series of screw-ups that have plagued recent elections in the city.

But the corrected count is far from complete, with more than 125,000 mail-in, absentee ballots that arrived ahead of Tuesday’s deadline still being counted.

The outstanding votes led critics to question why the BOE even released Tuesday’s preliminary results, with veteran political consultant Sid Davidoff calling the numbers “relatively meaningless.”

“It would have been more beneficial for them to wait until they had a complete picture rather than further muddy the waters in an already confusing issue,” added Davidoff, a former aide to the late Mayor John Lindsay.

The final results are scheduled to be released on July 5.

Tuesday’s epic fail has sparked calls for reform that include disbanding the 10-member Board of Elections, which is composed of five Democrats and five Republicans — one each from the city’s five boroughs — who are hand-picked by their local party leaders.

“We’ve seen some pretty bad errors before, but this one seems to be a national embarrassment,” city Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said Wednesday.

“Hopefully, the national nature of this will finally spur some change.”

Also Wednesday, The Post exclusively revealed that the BOE’s executive director, Mike Ryan, has been on medical leave since March amid a battle with stage 4 cancer.

BOE Deputy Executive Director Dawn Sandow, a Bronx Republican political appointee, has been filling in for Ryan, but a fellow GOP official described her as a “disaster,” adding, “She isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.”

In response, a BOE spokeswoman said, “Ms. Sandow has worked for the Board since 2005 and served as our Deputy Executive Director for over a decade. She served as acting Executive Director from 2010 to 2013. She has helped oversee the implementation of the new voting system, launch Election Night Reporting and Early Voting.”

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