Oswald Feliz maintained his lead in the March 23 District 15 City Council special election, following three completed rounds of ranked choice voting counts by the New York City Board of Elections (BOE) on Sunday, April 11. However, to date, he has not reached the required 50 percent plus one share of the overall vote to declare himself the winner.

The votes tallied now include the total of voters’ ranked choice votes based on election day ballots, absentee ballots, early voting ballots and military ballots. The ranked choice process began on Sunday, April 11, and after round one, 12 write-in votes were eliminated and redistributed accordingly to the impacted 12 voters’ second choice candidates, where applicable.

After Round 2, Arial Rivera Diaz, a former finance clerk with the City’s Board of Elections, and former official at the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, was eliminated and his votes were redistributed to other candidates. Round 3 eliminated José Padilla, former Independence candidate for both the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate, and his votes were then also redistributed. The count now moves to Round 4 to see if any one candidate reaches the required 50 percent plus one vote share needed to win.

As reported previously by Norwood News, Feliz, a tenant lawyer and Hostos Community College adjunct professor, had taken a strong, early lead with 28.42 percent (973 votes), following the release by the BOE of the unofficial results on election night which included first-choice early votes, and first choice election day ballots only. 

He was followed by Bronx Community Board 7 District Manager, Ischia Bravo, with 21.54 percent (738 votes), and Bronx Community Board 6 District Manager, John Sanchez, with 20.21 percent (693 votes), based on over 96 percent of voting scanners reported.

As of Sunday evening, following three completed rounds of the ranked choice votes, though his overall share of ranked choice votes dropped from 28.42 to 27.23 percent, he stretched his lead on Bravo to 259 votes, versus his previous lead on election night of 235. Feliz now has 1,083 votes, followed by Bravo with 824 and Sanchez with 814.

A total of 93,211 residents were registered to vote in District 15 in the nonpartisan special election as of Feb. 21, 2021, according to the BOE, with 12,366 voters deemed inactive, and 80,845 deemed active. The last date to mail a registration form to vote in the special election was Feb. 26, while the last date to register to vote in person was March 13.

Reacting to the latest news, Feliz, whose candidacy was previously profiled by the Norwood News, said, “We are proud of the campaign that we ran – a campaign laser-focused on the issues that affect residents of the Bronx.” He added, “I am humbled by the support we received, and humbled by the possibility that I will be the representative of the community that I’ve always called home.”

We also reached out for comment to both Bravo and Sanchez. Both said they preferred to wait for the final results of the race before commenting.

District 15 candidate, Elisa Crespo, an education liaison for Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who recently announced that she will not be running in the June primary, has now earned 609 votes in the special election. She is followed by Latchmi Devi Gopal, a community organizer and former staffer for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, with 166 votes, Altagracia Soldevilla, another community organizer, with 104, Kenny Agosto, district director to New York State Senator Jamaal T. Bailey, with 101, and Bernadette Ferrara, president of the Van Nest Neighborhood Alliance, with 89. Exhausted votes now account for 187.

The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Feliz was born in New York City and raised in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx, where he attended local public schools. Feliz helped form a tenant association of over 50 tenants, and successfully negotiated a settlement from a powerful landlord in the Southern Boulevard section of the Bronx to provide tenants with nearly $100,000 in damages, due to the deplorable conditions in which they were living in the affected building.

Prior to his work as an attorney, Feliz worked on behalf of Bronx families as a legislative staffer for State Sen. Gustavo Rivera. He then joined Congressman Adriano Espaillat’s 2016 campaign for the 13th Congressional District, which the congressman won. Feliz also co-founded the Northwest Bronx Democrats for Change, where he has worked to increase political participation by organizing community town halls, and holding voter registration drives in the Bronx.

If elected, he is set to become the youngest City Council member in New York City to be elected to that office.

Whoever wins the race will succeed the former councilman, Congressman Ritchie Torres, who was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2020, representing the 15th congressional district.

Round 4 began on Monday morning, April 12, and continued through subsequent rounds. Crespo, Devi Gopal, Agosto Soldevilla, and Ferrara were eliminated along the way in addition to Padilla and Rivera-Diaz.

Sanchez was eliminated when he had 1,061 votes. When Feliz had 1,312 votes, Bravo had 1,118 and there were 486 remaining ballots still to be counted, Round 10 went ahead.

admin

Welcome to the Norwood News, a bi-weekly community newspaper that primarily serves the northwest Bronx communities of Norwood, Bedford Park, Fordham and University Heights. Through our Breaking Bronx blog, we focus on news and information for those neighborhoods, but aim to cover as much Bronx-related news as possible. Founded in 1988 by Mosholu Preservation Corporation, a not-for-profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center, the Norwood News began as a monthly and grew to a bi-weekly in 1994. In September 2003 the paper expanded to cover University Heights and now covers all the neighborhoods of Community District 7. The Norwood News exists to foster communication among citizens and organizations and to be a tool for neighborhood development efforts. The Norwood News runs the Bronx Youth Journalism Heard, a journalism training program for Bronx high school students. As you navigate this website, please let us know if you discover any glitches or if you have any suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. You can send e-mails to norwoodnews@norwoodnews.org or call us anytime (718) 324-4998.