Ranked-choice, not quite ready

Our special elections in Queens and the Bronx were the first real tests of the new Ranked Choice Voting system in NYC since voters gave it the green light in 2019. We’re grateful to the local Board of Elections workers who made sure every vote was counted (and recounted) and proudly look forward to serving our communities on the City Council.

But throughout the process, we saw serious issues and avoidable delays that must be quickly addressed before this June’s primaries. As the first City Council members to experience RCV in action, we’re calling on the state BOE to finally approve vote-counting software to avoid drawn-out, potentially risky hand counts; make much-needed improvements to the RCV process; and implement real voter education and outreach about the new process.

Ranked Choice Voting has the potential to strengthen our democracy. Giving voters the freedom to list their choices encourages greater participation, allows voters to cast more meaningful votes, and ensures that the winner is broadly supported. While we ran campaigns that reached every voter across the communities we represent, RCV encourages all candidates to do the same, instead of focusing on only limited pockets of voters in specific communities or constituencies.

Yet as we adopt RCV, it is clear there is still a steep learning curve. In our races, voters we talked to were confused about how to rank their choices and what RCV would mean for the outcome. In our races, it took BOE workers at least three days to painstakingly count each ballot by hand. For each round of the reallocation process, paper ballots were stacked high in bins for each candidate. When a candidate was eliminated, the whole hand-counting process started over again, with BOE workers counting ballot after ballot. Ultimately, it took more than three weeks from the election for results to be certified.

With the large number of citywide primary elections looming in June, the amount of time it has taken for election results to be available in our races would be a national embarrassment. If the RCV vote tabulation process took three days in each of our races — with nothing else on the ballot — imagine the debacle in June with dozens of Council races, multiple borough president races, controller, public advocate and mayor all on the ballot.

Executing an RCV election at this scale will inevitably shape how the country views the process, and any failure will be blamed on the RCV process itself, when in truth, the blame will lie squarely with the state board’s failure to do its job.

Luckily, we still have time to anticipate problems and fix them.

First and foremost, the state board must stop dragging its feet after months of back-and-forth over the city’s proposed contract with an outside vendor and approve the software that will allow us to avoid long, drawn-out hand counts. City board workers did an incredible job diligently counting each ballot by hand and we’re grateful for their work, but they shouldn’t have to count and recount ballots or months on end for overlapping offices when the software is available and ready to use.

Next, we need more robust outreach and education efforts so voters enter the voting booth with confidence, not confusion. Our campaigns worked to educate voters on the RCV process, from providing sample ballots to communicating in multiple languages about the change to our voting system, but it’s not enough to reach everyone. The city must make a real effort to explain the process voters right now, especially our seniors, non-English speakers, and the most marginalized New Yorkers, so they aren’t intimidated by the new process or accidentally vote incorrectly and have their ballot invalidated.

Seniors are our most reliable voters, and we need targeted outreach about the changes to our voting process. And these education efforts must extend beyond webinars conducted in English; resources must be provided, in different languages and with non-online education materials, to reach those without internet access or familiarity with technology.

Across the country, Republicans are pushing false narratives about election security to justify racist voter suppression and put forward hundreds of new voting restrictions in 43 states. RCV gives our city the chance to expand democratic access, transform how campaigns are run, and set the standard for the rest of the country. But if we can’t run this smoothly — avoiding stacks of ballots from being hand-counted over weeks and months — we’ll only be giving the GOP fodder for their disinformation and lies.

With just over two months until the primary in June, there’s a small window for us to learn from these special elections. We’re imploring the state Board of Elections to get this right.

Dinowitz is the new Councilman-elect from the 11th District in the Bronx and Brooks-Powers is the newly elected Councilwoman from Queens’ 31st district.