Claims of election irregularities are surfacing following New York City’s 2025 mayoral election, with one election-integrity organization alleging that its review uncovered enough questionable voter records to exceed Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s margin of victory. The allegations have attracted attention online, but they have not been substantiated by election officials or the courts.
The claims come from Marly Hornik, founder of RealAmerica.Vote and NY Citizens Audit. During a July 22 appearance on WABC’s Sid & Friends in the Morning, Hornik emphasized that she was not claiming Mamdani definitively lost the election.
“I actually don’t know whether Mamdani won the mayoral race, and I’m not here to say that he didn’t,” Hornik said. “The problem we uncovered is that the New York City and the New York State Boards of Elections have no idea if Mamdani won the mayoral election either.”
According to Hornik, her organization reviewed approximately one million of the roughly 2.2 million ballots cast in the election. She alleged that the audit found a variety of questionable records, including voters she claimed could not be verified, records she said contained invalid Social Security numbers, and individuals she alleged did not reside within New York City.
Hornik said those findings amounted to approximately 230,000 votes that her organization believes warrant further scrutiny. That figure exceeds Mamdani’s reported margin of victory of roughly 207,000 votes over former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
I’ve been trying and trying to tell you this. Over 100,000 blank votes that should have been discarded, were counted. When I showed this live on my podcast on the Board of Elections website, the site went down for 45 minutes. So much more fraud than this. @pepesgrandma https://t.co/qvDUbJqG1t
— Dr. Naomi Wolf. 8 NYT Bestsellers. DPhil, Poetry. (@naomirwolf) July 23, 2026
Even so, Hornik maintained that her focus is not on declaring the election outcome invalid but on questioning whether election officials have sufficiently accurate voter records.
“So out of 2.2 million voters, we studied about a million of them, and we found more votes that are apparently illegal than his margin of victory,” she said. “Again, the issue is not whether or not Mamdani won. The issue is whether or not the boards of elections in New York are actually counting fair elections so that we are properly represented as we are constitutionally granted.”
Hornik made similar claims during another WABC interview on July 19, arguing that the statistics her organization compiled could point to serious problems within the city’s election system.
“We were unable to verify any of their critical information as provided by the boards of elections—their name, their date of birth, their voting address,” Hornik said. “They don’t exist. They’re fake people.”
She also said her organization has forwarded its findings to federal authorities for review.
“This is in the hands of federal investigators and prosecutors right now, because again, when our right to choose representatives is diluted or harmed, injured in any way, that is a serious crime in America,” Hornik said.
At the time of her interviews, no public findings from federal investigators had been released regarding the allegations, and election officials had not publicly confirmed Hornik’s claims. Likewise, no court had determined that the reported election results were invalid.
