Ranked-choice voting debuts in NYC

Voting in New York City’s first ranked-choice election will begin Saturday for an open Queens City Council seat — an election that will serve as a prelude to a contest with much higher stakes — the Democratic primary battle for mayor in June.

The special election in Queens — for the Council seat vacated last year when Councilman Rory Lancman stepped down to join Gov. Cuomo’s team — begins with early voting this weekend. In-person voting will take place on Feb. 2.

The Queens race features five candidates — Moumita Ahmed, Stanley Arden, James Gennaro, Joshua Maynard and Mohammed Uddin — but perhaps more importantly, it will give the city Board of Elections a chance to iron out any kinks before the June mayoral primary.

“It’s simple, but people aren’t used to it,” said Jerry Goldfeder, a veteran election law attorney. “It’s the perfect opportunity for the Board of Elections to develop its ballot and voting machines in this new way of voting.”

Ranked-choice elections in the Big Apple mean voters get up to five choices among candidates listed on the ballot and can rank each of those choices according to preference.

If voters prefer, they’re can forego the ranking and just pick one candidate. But they cannot give more than one candidate any one ranking.

Once the ballots are counted, if a candidate receives more than 50% of first-choice votes, they’ll be declared the winner. If not, the tallying of votes moves to a second round, in which the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The first-choice votes for that candidate are then set aside and the vote tally moves to those voters’ second-choices.

Board of Elections spokeswoman Valerie Diaz said that while the board isn’t mandated to provide public education for the new system, it has undertaken a five-language public education campaign.

“We have sent out a direct mailing piece to all voters in the district in five languages,” she said. “We have created an instructional palm card — five languages — that will be available at all poll sites, a landing page on our website with FAQs and a detailed video tutorial.”

The rationale for the new system is to avoid run-off elections in sometimes crowded primary fields where a decisive winner does not always emerge.

Before ranked-choice voting, close primaries for citywide office were decided by a runoff when no candidate received 40% of the vote. If that happened, the top two candidates would go toe-totoe in the runoff.

But ranked-choice poses its own challenges. The upcoming June primary will include both ranked-choice contests — for mayor, public advocate and comptroller — and the more traditional non-ranked choice for the judges and district attorneys races.

“It’s going to be more difficult in June,” Goldfeder predicted.