Though the possibility of a runoff remains, it looks very likely that the New York City mayoral race will pit Bill de Blasio, a progressive, tax-the-rich liberal, against Joe Lhota, a Republican seen as the "last, best hope for salvaging the business-friendly government of the Bloomberg era." Are you ready for a real live class war? Now, we get one.

The race for New York City Public Advocate—an office with a budget of just over $2 million— may be the only one going to a runoff, which could cost $20 million. Flip a fucking coin.

Yesterday, a very important NYC thing happened: Two kittens halted the subway's B and Q lines for an hour. How could two feline urchins so rudely interrupt the necessary flow of human transport? the bad people wondered. Ooooh, kitties! the good people cooed.

Young people are bad at voting, but very good at boozing. So what's one reliable way to get them to the polls? The promise of a free drink.

A man who has been legally dead since 2010 was elected mayor of a small Mexican town on Sunday.

Democratic Rep. Edward Markey defeated Republican candidate Gabriel Gomez in the special election in Massachusetts for John Kerry's vacated Senate seat.

Hassan Rowhani (alternately Rouhani) won the Iranian presidential election today with a decisive majority, avoiding a runoff. Rowhani, a cleric, ran on a platform of moderation and reform, speaking about freeing political prisoners, working to guarantee civil rights and to restore "dignity to the nation."

A judicial investigation has been opened against former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, after allegations that he received illegal funding from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi for his 2007 campaign. Sarkozy met Gaddafi in Paris in 2007 and has long denied wrongdoing.

New York State Senator Malcolm A. Smith and City Councilman Daniel J. Halloran were arrested early this morning on charges of trying to rig the New York City mayoral race. The two men were among several facing federal corruption charges.

Election-Svengali Nate Silver will stop blogging if he believes that his election forecasts begin to actually affect elections. According to a report in Politico (a site Silver has a pretty hilarious feud with), Silver spoke to an audience at Washington University about the statistical pitfalls of accruing such a large following:

Richard Posner, judge, legal scholar, and the type of celebrity essayist that makes one question his fitness for the two preceding positions, has written a defense of the Electoral College in Slate. It qualifies as trolling, as done by a legal scholar. Let us take it point by point.

As we wrote last night, dead Englishman Charles Darwin received some 4,000 write-in votes in the race for Georgia's tenth congressional district, owing to the anti-science statements of his, uh, opponent, Republican Rep. Paul Broun. But Darwin wasn't the only write-in candidate! Local Athens publication Flagpole has a list of all the write-in candidates. And basically every single one would make a better candidate than Paul Broun, including, for example, "ANY NON-INSANE INDIVIDUAL":

When we asked people to share their stories of voting irregularity earlier today, dozens of people shared this video — currently on the Reddit front page with nearly 20,000 up-votes — of a Pennsylvania voting machine seemingly altering a man's vote from Obama to Romney. We reached out to Joseph Lorenzo Hall, Senior Staff Technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, to ask his opinion; here's what he told us:

Get to know Jack Wu, a God-fearing Christian man running for a seat on the Kansas Board of Education.

There are two equally valid and not incompatible reactions to have towards the WSJ's big investigative story today on political spending by unions. The first is that there is clearly some effort here by the (not particularly pro-union) WSJ on behalf of the right wing and/ or business interests to insinuate that union spending is a counterbalance to corporate Super PAC spending, so everything is fair. The second is that unions need to spend their money on different shit.

Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi won the presidency in Egypt, beating opponent Ahmed Shafik in the country's closely watched election. Shafik was the last prime minister to have served under ousted President Hosni Mubarak.

A hotel proprietor in Northern Italy accidentally became mayor of a small town earlier this week, without even intending to run for election.

For reasons nobody can entirely explain, a provocatively dressed Playboy Playmate sashayed across the stage at last night's Mexican presidential debate, causing candidates to ogle openly and igniting some sort of nationwide sex riot, the AP reports.

Socialist candidate Francois Hollande was elected president of France on Sunday. He defeated conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy with 51 percent of the vote, following a bitter campaign that focused primary on the country's economic woes.

Via Copyranter, the tale of University of Calgary Hayley Wade, whose innovative campaign for Vice President of Student Life used this poster ("Great dick bro!") above urinals in the men's bathrooms on campus. She won. Mitt Romney, take note. [Copyranter]