Ranked Choice Voting in NYC: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

    In class, we've discussed several different voting procedures. Mueller 7.1 defines several different types including majority rule, plurality rule, ranked-choice voting, and the coombs system. In real life, we see all of these different systems used to decide the winners of elections. What we can say for sure is that it is very difficult to decide a winner, and the rules of the election affect the outcome. One type of voting process that is becoming more and more popular is ranked-choice voting (RCV). With RCV, voters go into the booth and rank the candidates. In round one, if a candidate earns a majority of first-place votes, they are declared the winner. If not, then the candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated and their votes are then distributed based on those voters' second-choice candidate. This process is repeated until a candidate has a majority. 

    This voting process has become more and more popular in the US. For instance, in 2021, New York City used RCV for the first time in its elections. New Yorkers were able to rank their top five choices on their ballots for each position. This election was especially important for the mayoral primary which was won by less than one percentage point. In NYC, this voting method has both positive and negative attributes depending on who you talk to. An analysis of RCV in NYC shows that this voting method led to fewer "inactive" or "wasted" ballots (in other words, a ballot that did not rank one of the two candidates left after all elimination rounds). This means that with RCV, more citizens' ranked votes played a role in deciding the final outcome of the election - 15% of ballots were inactive with RCV during the mayoral primary in 2021 as compared to 33% during the 2013 mayoral primary. In many ways, this is a positive attribute of RCV. There were many people in New York, however, who were concerned about the system disenfranchising voters who may not have time to learn the process, such as low-income voters. In fact, there were many members of the City Council's Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus who opposed RCV, calling it sophisticated voter suppression. They even sued to delay the use of RCV, though this was unsuccessful. Overall, RCV may be a good thing as it results in a Condorcet winner a greater amount of times than other voting methods like majority rule. However, when it comes to its actual implementation, issues like voter education and voter suppression may cause many citizens to oppose the system.