Ranked-choice voting passed another big test in New York City. Around 800,000 New Yorkers voted in last week’s Democratic mayoral primary. Now as the final vote tallies come in, despite city officials’ mishandling of the vote tally, we can see that critics’ worst fears about this voting system were needless.
The city’s Board of Elections made an administrative goof during the count, which drew well-deserved blowback. But the apparent results of the election reveal that ranked-choice voting is a much more effective system than critics on the Right and the Left realize.
The Big Apple switched to ranked-choice voting in 2019, a change that was approved by voters by a 3-to-1 margin. Under the old system of voting, each primary voter had one vote to cast for one mayoral candidate. All too often, that system produced mayors who were not especially popular. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, won a mere 40% of the Democratic primary voters in 2018.
Ranked-choice voting changes the game. It empowers each voter to rank five candidates. If any candidate gets 50% or more first-rank votes, he or she wins. If none of them reach the 50% threshold, the lowest-scoring candidate is eliminated, and his or her second-rank votes get added to the vote tallies of the others. By eliminating the most unpopular candidates and transferring their voters’ preferences until one candidate hits the 50% mark, ranked-choice voting aims to reward the most generally acceptable candidate.
Many observers, especially on the political Right, were wary of the adoption of ranked-choice voting. The concerns were many. Some critics feared voters would be left in the lurch for weeks with no clue who won. The delay would foment voter disbelief, they proffered. Critics on the Left suggested that ranked-choice voting would work against the interests of minorities and reward a white candidate in a majority-minority city. Skeptics on the Right imagined voters might rank outrageous or protest candidates first, putting a crank in City Hall. Other doubters ventured that voters would not be able to handle ranking voters and would default to choosing the candidate with the highest name recognition.
None of these anxieties came to be. Within a day of the election, Eric Adams was firmly in the lead. On Tuesday, initial results showed Adams passing the 50% mark, earning 51.1% of the votes, not including about 124,000 absentee ballots. Despite the Board of Elections flub, the initial results reveal that these fears over ranked-choice voting are unfounded.
Adams is black, and he got a great deal of support from outside Manhattan, which is heavily populated by nonwhite voters. Maya Wiley, the third-place finisher, also is black. Blacks comprise about 24% of New York City, so these initial results suggest ranked-choice voting was anything but discriminatory.
Now that Adams is the probable winner of the Democratic primary, this should be of particular interest to conservatives, who are few in New York City. Adams is a law-and-order candidate, who was favored by the New York Post, the city’s right-wing tabloid. He is clearly to the right of Wiley and Kathryn Garcia, who remains behind Adams with 48.9% of the vote.
The celebrity candidate, former presidential aspirant Andrew Yang, conceded on election night. Despite his early surge in the polls, he failed to give many voters great confidence in his ability to lead and so earned few top rankings.
Although ranked-choice voting induced 50 candidates to throw their hats in the ring, the extremists and goofballs never got traction. Voters, in short, did not waste their top votes.
The evidence plainly indicates that most voters ranked competent candidates at the top. Adams’s public service resume is extensive. He is the current borough president of Brooklyn, served in the state’s Senate, and spent 20 years as a police captain and officer. Wiley is an attorney who has served as a counsel to de Blasio and chairman of the city’s police oversight board, among other positions. Garcia is a former sanitation commissioner and has worked in the city’s finance, housing, and environmental protection departments.
All in all, using ranked-choice voting in the primaries made for a more exciting mayoral race and produced solid candidates. Voters had more candidates to choose from and could more broadly express their preferences for mayor. Nobody had to worry about “wasting” their vote on a long-shot candidate.
The only flaw in New York City’s ranked-choice voting reform is that it was too modest in scope. The city retained its current primary system, which excludes around 1 million independent voters from participation. It also retained the old one-vote-for-one-candidate system for the autumn general election for mayor. With Democrats so greatly outnumbering the GOP, voter turnout will per usual be egregiously low. Adams or whoever is the Democratic nominee will trounce the GOP candidate, Curtis Sliwa.
The city should build on this positive experience by enacting a variant of final-five voting. This would replace the current two partisan primaries with a single open primary, in which mayoral candidates from all parties would compete. The primary’s top five candidates would advance to the general election, and the winner would be picked through ranked-choice voting. The result would be broader voter participation and more competitive elections, which New York City voters deserve.
Kevin R. Kosar is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
