In June, New York City held its first so-called ranked-choice election. Voters were asked to rank at least their five top candidates in the primary elections for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, city council, and borough president. They were supposed to rank their top candidate first, their second choice second, and so on.
While ranked-choice advocates argue that the system encourages high turnout, only 26 percent of eligible Democratic voters decided to take part.
New York City’s ranked-choice system is currently set up so that a single candidate who receives at least 50 percent of first-place votes is the winner. In the event that no candidate reaches that threshold, the person with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and those who supported that candidate’s second choice votes are then allocated. Each time a candidate is eliminated, the voters’ next choice is tabulated. If a voter’s first, second, and third choices have all been eliminated, then their fourth choice would be counted as their vote.
Votes are continuously reallocated in such a manner until someone gets to the magic 50 percent threshold—the majority’s support. After eight “instant-runoff” rounds in New York City, Eric Adams was that person. The final result was close, with Adams defeating Kathryn Garcia by less than a percentage point. Like Adams, Garcia ran on expanding the NYPD budget and made appeals to concerns about crime and safety.
Ranked-choice advocates are celebrating the election as a success and are now hoping to expand the system across the country. Maine uses rank-choice voting at the state level and five other states have adopted but have yet to implement rank-choice voting measures. Nationwide nonprofit campaigns like FairVote are spurring the creation of localized initiatives too: Wisconsin’s Democracy Found, as well as regional branches such as FairVote California.
Ranked-choice activists often argue that the system is good for democracy because it cuts out “fringe” candidates—like Donald Trump—who have a large, passionate, and pluralistic base but do not enjoy support from a broad majority. Ranked-choice advocates argue that Trump could not have won the 2016 GOP nomination if he had not only needed to get 35 to 40 percent pluralities in primary states.
Within the Democratic Party, the argument is that ranked-choice voting will weed out “fringe” leftist candidates in favor of more appealing, mainstream “moderate” voices.
Though there were plenty of moderate candidates, there were hardly any pure progressives in New York City’s mayoral primary. That said, moderates Adams and Garcia evidently had the broadest support, while the de facto leftwing standard bearer Maya Wiley finished third.
While ranked-choice advocates argue that the system encourages high turnout, only 26 percent of eligible Democratic voters decided to take part. Yes, 26 percent was the highest turnout for a New York City mayoral primary in decades, but that’s a low bar and not exactly indicative of a vibrant urban democracy.
Ranked-choice advocates were wrong about other things, too. A central justification is that the system discourages negative campaigning and mudslinging. But this year’s New York City mayoral primary was no less nasty nor chaotic than what New Yorkers have come to expect from their colorful and vitriolic politics.
Even if we accept that ranked-choice voting does reduce political negativity, where does that get us? The argument is that the tension and hostility—admittedly real—between Americans stems purely from political rhetoric (a common narrative), and once that is toned down and the “fringe” elements of politics and society eliminated, we can all sing kumbaya and everything will be perfect and wonderful.
Rhetoric and media definitely have played a role in stoking the flames of vitriol, but people are angry for many other reasons, like climate change, economic disparity, systemic racism, and so on. The anger that centrist gatekeepers fear and do not understand is much bigger than heated rhetoric and our voting system.
In a ranked-choice system, would citizens be any more empowered than they are now to express dissent in tangible ways and take part in the political process? I suspect that the answer is no, because beyond “ending negative campaigning,” I’m not clear on the alternative. As it relates to special interests and the national security state, there is plenty of bipartisanship in our politics. Even social and cultural disagreements are often more narrow than they appear.
“It is notable that, in the midst of a presidential campaign that has unmasked deep and dangerous fissures in American politics,” Simon Waxman wrote in a piece for Democracy in 2016, “concerned citizens are looking to procedural minutiae as their savior.”
The problem with ranked-choice voting isn’t that it’s necessarily unfair in and of itself. From a purely objective standpoint, Adams had the broadest support and deserved to win. The problem is that ranked-choice voting is presented as a grand solution to issues like “partisanship” and “negativity,” when really it is an incremental change that more or less upholds the status quo, if not worsens it.
Look at it this way: Eric Adams still raked in tons of corporate and special interest money and, as noted earlier, the campaign was as negative as most New York City elections are.
We need to be thinking bigger, and a lot less conventionally.