Governor Kathy Hochul and lieutenant-governor candidate Adrienne Adams led New York's unofficial statewide returns Wednesday morning, according to the election-night reporting system maintained by the New York State Board of Elections. At 9:42 a.m., the Democratic and Working Families lines together had 3,487,762 votes, or 59.13 percent of the candidate vote displayed. Bruce Blakeman and Todd Hood had 2,339,265 votes across the Republican and Conservative lines, or 39.66 percent.
The public display showed 12,175 of 13,187 election districts reporting in the governor's contest. It also carried a prominent warning that the totals were incomplete. A significant number of emergency Election Day ballots from Westchester County had not been scanned, and additional eligible ballots could still enter the count. Those limitations make the page a preliminary measure of the race rather than the state's legal declaration of a winner.
New York's system combines a candidate's votes across authorized party lines. Hochul and Adams received 3,123,773 votes on the Democratic line and 363,989 on the Working Families line in the displayed count. Blakeman and Hood received 2,071,231 votes on the Republican line and 228,736 on the Conservative line. The Vote Affordable line recorded 39,298 votes. Blank, void and write-in ballots were listed separately from the candidate totals.
The same reporting page showed 5,898,445 total ballots recorded in the governor section, including blank, void and write-in categories. That number will not necessarily remain fixed. County boards must complete a recanvass of early-voting and Election Day ballots and review valid early-mail, absentee, military, overseas, special and affidavit ballots before certification. Election-night reporting is designed to provide public visibility while that statutory work continues.
The state board says county results are normally certified only after all required counting tasks are complete. For a general election, that process usually occurs within 25 days. Counties then transmit certified results to the state board for aggregation and publication. A later adjustment can reflect a newly scanned election district, an accepted mail ballot, a corrected upload or another routine canvass step; it does not by itself show that an earlier ballot was improperly handled.
The governor contest was not the only statewide race on the page. Preliminary returns also showed Thomas DiNapoli leading the comptroller race and Letitia James leading the attorney general contest. Each office has its own reporting total and district count, so percentages should not be transferred from one race to another. Voters may leave a contest blank, and election districts can report at different times for different data feeds.
Readers following the count should note both the timestamp and the number of districts reporting. A screenshot or copied percentage can become outdated as counties add files. The official state page is the appropriate place to check the current preliminary total, while the later certified-results publication will become the authoritative record. Campaign statements and media projections do not replace either stage of the government count.
Wednesday's returns establish a clear preliminary lead for Hochul and Adams, but the careful description remains unofficial. The outstanding Westchester emergency ballots, post-election ballot processing and county recanvass are still part of the election. New York's legal result will be the certified total after those steps, not the first complete-looking number displayed on election night. The same distinction applies even when the apparent margin is wide: certification protects the integrity of the complete record, not only contests where the lead is small.
Primary sources: New York State Board of Elections unofficial results; New York State Board of Elections results explanation. Reviewed November 4, 2026. Development: Unofficial returns updated November 4, 2026.