The New York City Democratic primary elections on June 22 should have demonstrated the superiority of liberal election administration. Mail-in voting was widespread, with extremely generous deadlines for ballot arrival. In-person early voting was available. Photo identification for voters was unnecessary. And in 2019, the city added the trendiest new “solution” to “save democracy”: ranked-choice voting, with the financial help of liberal billionaires such as James and Kathryn Murdoch, Jonathan Soros, and Laura and John Arnold (through their Action Now Initiative).
But more than one week after the votes were cast, they had not been counted, and the city’s hegemonic Democratic Party did not know whom it had nominated for mayor.
And part of the problem is the new ranked-choice voting system that the billionaires pushed. In the new system (which replaced a traditional runoff if no candidate received more than 40% of the vote), election administrators had to reallocate the second, third, fourth, and fifth preferences of people who voted for eliminated candidates. That would be enough of a problem but one that might have been overcome; combined with the extremely generous mail-in voting and the New York City Board of Election’s rank incompetence, the result is chaos.
Now, many wonks love ranked-choice voting. They have very well-defined policy goals. They would consume unhealthy amounts of political media even if they weren’t paid to do so. They know in excruciating detail the minute policy differences between various candidates of the same party. So, ranking their choices in alignment with their preferences makes intuitive sense; why would anyone conduct an election any other way?
But I must respectfully dissent from the position of my fellow wonks because I am painfully aware of something they forget: We are weird creatures in the political zoo. The average voter does not have very well-defined policy goals based on white papers, books of ideology, and exhaustive social science research. Voters have intuitions, partisan allegiances that derive as much from culture and circumstance as from pure reason, and an inclination to support incumbents when things are good and challengers when things are bad. The average voter does not consume unhealthy amounts of political media: In the latest monthly average ratings, fewer people watch cable news on a given night in the whole country than voted in the 2018 Ohio gubernatorial election.
So, voters’ ranked choices, especially in party primaries where labels and heuristics aren’t available, often end up appearing incoherent. In 2016, reporters covering the Republican primary found themselves confused when some voters they interviewed supported Donald Trump, seen as a populist firebrand, but also expressed a liking for Marco Rubio, seen as an establishment conciliator. It’s not that the voters could not “see reason” or were somehow “wrong.” The voters were just Republicans, and they liked two different Republicans who would both support most Republican goals.
So, ranked-choice voting doesn’t guarantee a more “accurate” reflection of voter preferences than an old-fashioned runoff election, when voters can focus on the two surviving candidates and discern their differences with ordinary effort. But that alone doesn’t guarantee the chaos New York has seen: After all, the state of Maine and other cities including San Francisco have used ranked-choice voting for good and ill.
New York’s traffic jam is the consequence of wonks’ and billionaires’ bright ideas meeting real-world politics. New York City’s Board of Elections is notorious as a political patronage factory, and New York state’s elections have a long record of questionable administration. Adding complexity to a barely functional at the best of times administrative apparatus was always going to lead to trouble.
And New York election administrators can’t say they weren’t warned. In 2020, Iowa Democrats tried to use a form of preference-reallocation voting in their party presidential caucuses; the effects were catastrophic, as technological failures in the tabulation application and confusion about the reallocation rules led to delays in determining the outcome.
The lesson from these fiascoes? Follow Florida and keep it simple. After 2000, when the presidential election in Florida led to a chaotic recount, the state revitalized its election procedures. As a result, the state has among the best-administered elections in the country, with results reported rapidly and accurately with high confidence in the outcomes, even as the state has substantial access to mail-in and early voting. Don’t let billionaires such as the liberal branch of the Murdoch family or the Arnolds push New York’s chaos onto your elections: Look to the Florida men instead.
Michael Watson is research director at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C.
