Cities try new voting option

After NYC uses ranked balloting, others test it out

The most high-profile experiment in rankedchoice voting in U.S. history just took place in New York City.

The reviews are mixed. Hundreds of thousands of voters ranked up to five candidates on their ballots in the Democratic primary for mayor, and many were glad to have that option. Others found the system confusing or wished they had been more strategic in making their choices.

Some elected officials want to scrap the system, because they believe it may disenfranchise Black voters, among others. But for now, it appears, ranked-choice voting is here to stay.

Eric Adams, the winner of the Democratic mayoral primary, saw his lead over the secondplace candidate shrink from 75,000 votes to only 7,197 after ranked choices were counted, and he attacked two of his rivals for campaigning together in the race’s final days to try to beat him.

One of Adams’ allies, Council member I. Daneek Miller of Queens, is promoting a bill that would let New Yorkers decide whether they want to keep ranked-choice voting, although there does not appear to be enough support among his colleagues for it to be approved.

This year’s primary was the first time New York had used rankedchoice voting in a citywide race. The system is used in other countries and in cities like San Francisco. Other places, including Washington D.C., the Seattle area and Lansing, Mich. could move to adopt the system.

Christina Henderson, a member of Washington’s

City Council and a supporter of a bill that would bring ranked-choice there, said the New York election showed the system’s benefits, including the diversity of winning candidates like Adams.

“Races are more dynamic and collegial with genuine policy debates supplanting negative campaign tactics,” Henderson said.

The new system changed how some candidates campaigned for mayor, encouraging them to appeal to their rivals’ supporters to earn a spot on their ballots. By striking a late alliance with Andrew Yang, for example, Kathryn Garcia won over many of his voters.

But a major snafu by the city’s perennially dysfunctional Board of Elections could undermine confidence in the system. And although Adams won the primary, his allies have raised concerns that rankedchoice voting could hurt Black voters who might choose only one candidate.

Adams himself has criticized how rankedchoice voting was rolled out, but he does not want to eliminate it. He called for more education about it.

“Your New York Times readers, your Wall Street Journal readers and all of those that had the ability to analyze all this information, it’s fine for them,” Adams said. “But that’s not the reality when English is a second language, that’s not the reality for 85- and 90year-old voters who are trying to navigate the process. Every new barrier you put in place, you’re going to lose voters in the process.”

Ranked-choice advocates say the system helped improve the fortunes of female and minority candidates. The City Council appears poised to have its firstever female majority, and women finished second and third in the mayoral primary.

“We won’t let anyone take away the people’s voice and go back to the old system where costly, low-turnout runoff elections actually disenfranchised people,” said Debbie Louis, the lead organizer for Rank the Vote NYC, a group that supports the voting system.

Some voters did not like the new approach. Rebecca Yhisreal, 61, who lives in West Harlem, said she voted for Adams first and ranked three other candidates on her ballot. But she said she preferred the old system, under which New Yorkers voted for one candidate and if no one got more than 40 percent of the vote, the top two finishers would go to a runoff.

Miller, who testified at a state Assembly hearing this week with other critics of ranked-choice voting, said it encouraged voters to focus on the horse race between candidates rather than on issues, he said.

Under ranked-choice voting, if no candidate gets more than 50 percent of first-choice votes on an initial tally, the process moves to an elimination-round method. The lowest-polling candidates are eliminated, with their votes reallocated to whichever remaining candidates those voters ranked next. The process continues until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.

Some voters expressed regret that they had not been more shrewd by picking between Adams or Garcia so that their ballot helped decide the winner. More than 140,000 ballots were “exhausted,” meaning they did not name either finalist and were therefore thrown out.

Those ballots represented nearly 15 percent of the 940,000 votes cast, a higher rate than in some other rankedchoice elections. Advocates for ranked-choice voting say the share of exhausted ballots should decrease as New Yorkers become more familiar with the system.