Q&A: You’ll likely have to wait for the winner

Tuesday will be the first citywide election to utilize the Big Apple’s new ranked-choice voting system. Here’s a guide to what we’ll know and what we won’t know on primary night.

What will we know Tuesday night?

Board of Elections officials have promised they will make initial tallies of the first-round selections cast during early voting and on primary day that night. That will give us a rough idea of how many people turned out to vote and the size of the front-runner’s lead.

Will anyone have a big enough lead to be declared likely winner Tuesday?

Unless all of the recent polling is way off, no.

When will we know ranked-choice results?

The BOE has promised to run the first round of tabulations for ranked-choice voting on Tuesday, June 29.

However, that calculation will not include many of the potentially 220,000 absentee ballots. Officials will not begin to open the envelopes containing those until June 28 and the ballots have until June 29 to arrive at BOE offices for counting.

The BOE says it expects to have a significant chunk of the absentee ballots counted by July 6 and will rerun the results that Tuesday to incorporate those votes.

The Board of Elections will then notify voters who’ve made errors on their absentee ballots that they can fix. Those responses are due seven business days later, July 9.

That would mean it is possible to run the ranked-choice voting on Monday, July 12, at the earliest.

Why does ranked-choice voting take so long?

State election law and city Board of Elections operations.

Are there Republican primaries, too?

Yes, although Dems outnumber Republicans in the city by 8 to 1 and control virtually every facet of city government. We’ll likely know whether Curtis Sliwa or Fernando Mateo won Tuesday night.