After six weeks of delays, the New York City Board of Elections confirmed results in a pair of congressional races on Tuesday evening, delivering victories to a longtime Democratic incumbent and a young city lawmaker who could be a trailblazer for gay and African-American rights.
In the South Bronx, Ritchie Torres, a 32-year-old New York City councilman, won a 12-way Democratic primary for a soon-to-be-open House seat, continuing a dramatic remaking of the New York congressional delegation.
Just to the south, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, 74, narrowly brushed back a primary challenge from Suraj Patel, 36. The longtime incumbent just managed to sidestep a wave of youthful progressivism that has tilted New York’s congressional delegation to the left.
The extensive delays in declaring winners had stirred significant concerns about the problems facing officials trying to conduct elections during the coronavirus outbreak. New York City’s handling of the primary has been used as fodder by President Trump to raise questions about whether the nation is ready for the general election in November.
The primary was held on June 23, though the outbreak had caused a huge expansion in the use of vote-by-mail, which led to a torrent of absentee ballots sent to the Board of Elections in New York City.
The outbreak has prompted states across the nation to consider expanding mail-in voting for the general election in November, as public health officials worry that convening at polling locations may spread the disease. In New York City, officials were left counting more than 400,000 absentee ballots, more than 10 times the usual number in a primary.
The resulting backlog drew the derision of President Trump, who used the long delays as a reason to cast aspersions on voting-by-mail systems nationwide. It also led to bickering between Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other officials.
Although city elections officials certified the results, they did not release updated vote totals; The Associated Press, which typically declares election results, has not done so in either race.
Mr. Torres, who identifies as Afro-Latino, would most likely be one of the first two openly gay Black or Latino members of Congress; the other is Mondaire Jones, a 33-year old lawyer who defeated another crowded field seeking to fill the seat in the Hudson Valley being vacated by Nita Lowey, the first woman to chair the House Appropriations Committee.
Both Ms. Maloney’s seat in the 12th Congressional District, which includes parts of Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn, and the 15th Congressional District in the Bronx, where Mr. Torres won his primary, are solidly Democratic, making both candidates overwhelming favorites to win in November.
The incumbent in the 15th, Representative José E. Serrano, has served in Congress for three decades, and some Democrats were already threatening to run against him in the primary before he announced his retirement ahead of 2020, citing the effects of Parkinson’s disease.
Among the candidates Mr. Torres finished ahead of were Michael Blake, a state assemblyman and vice chair of the Democratic National Committee; Samelys López, a community organizer who had the backing of some key progressives, including Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Ydanis Rodriguez, a city councilman; and Melissa Mark-Viverito, a former City Council speaker.
But it was the chance to topple the Rev. Rubén Díaz Sr., Mr. Torres had said in an interview before the election, that would be especially sweet, representing “poetic justice that is long overdue.”
Looking back to his first City Council race seven years ago, he said, “I ran in a state of fear because of the homophobic political culture that Rubén Díaz Sr. has spent his life cultivating in the Bronx.”
Mr. Díaz, a 77-year-old Pentecostal minister who has served for two decades in the State Senate and the City Council, was under pressure last year from Council colleagues demanding that he resign for saying that legislative body was “controlled by the homosexual community.”
Ms. Maloney’s race against Mr. Patel was also marred by a dispute that wound up in federal court, where a judge in Manhattan ruled late Monday that elections officials must count at least 1,000 disputed mail-in ballots in their race, even though they did not have accurate or extant postmarks.
Even if Mr. Patel were to capture all those votes, it would not be enough for him to overtake Ms. Maloney. Nonetheless, Mr. Patel, a lawyer and business teacher who had framed the Democratic primary as a “change election” and himself as a change agent, has not conceded.
“This is no longer a Democratic or a Republican fight, this is not an establishment versus progressive fight,” he said on Monday. “This is now a fight for the voting rights of millions in a pandemic.”
Ms. Maloney has served in Congress since 1993 and became the first woman ever to lead the powerful Oversight and Reform Committee in November when she was elected to succeed Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, who had died a month earlier.
In a statement released on Tuesday night, Ms. Maloney framed the primary as a “historic election, with historic turnout and participation, and a historic wait time for results.”
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