If you were looking for a better way to sow more distrust in elections, you wouldn’t have to look further than New York City and its new ranked-choice voting system.
If you were looking for a similar mess to the 2020 Democratic Iowa Caucus, ranked-choice voting is for you. It helps that New York City is ridiculously incompetent when it comes to elections, to be sure, as evidenced by how slow the city was in counting votes in 2020. Inexplicably, the New York City Board of Elections counted over 130,000 sample ballots as votes in its mayoral contest and had to remove the voting results from its website.
In and of itself, New York City’s mess is not entirely the problem of ranked-choice voting, but the process remains an abomination. It is a grotesque distortion of the “one person, one vote” principle, in which someone’s vote for his third or fourth top candidate counts as much as another’s top option. According to the initial results, Eric Adams was 76,000 votes ahead of Maya Wiley and 98,000 votes ahead of Kathryn Garcia. Yet, he may well lose because more voters deem Wiley or Garcia to be the second (or third) best options to run the city.
There is no indication that ranked-choice voting encourages better candidates to enter the field, but it does promote mediocrity. Candidates that aren’t good enough to win over voters simply need to end up on their alternates list. You don’t have to be the best man or woman for the job. You just need to be available to be a pawn to stop another candidate from winning.
The process is ripe for corruption and, if implemented nationwide on a larger scale, would certainly serve to erode trust further at a time when both sides of the political aisle are deeming elections they lost to be illegitimate. It provides more ammunition to people such as former President Donald Trump and Stacey Abrams, not less.
The desire to see candidates reach 50% of the vote, even if most of those voters only view them as the third-best option (or worse), is a meaningless pursuit. But even if that is what we want to see in elections, the obvious alternative is the top-two runoff, which takes the two candidates that most voters think would be best for the job and pits them against each other. The idea that, in one election, we should be counting and distributing voters’ third, fourth, and fifth-favorite candidates is a ludicrous one.
We don’t need policy wonks to build a better mousetrap here. The problems with our politics, such as polarization and mediocre candidates, are not the result of the first-past-the-post system and won’t be solved by ranked-choice voting. These are cultural problems, and yearning for candidates to hit the magic 50% threshold does nothing other than satisfy the progressive impulse for some version of “proportional” representation.
