STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Many voters citywide will have their first experience with the new ranked-choice voting system in the primary elections set to start Saturday.
Instead of choosing one candidate, voters will have the opportunity to rank up to five candidates in their order of preference. Proponents say the system helps ensure winning candidates have more widespread support.
The system, which passed as a ballot measure in 2019, has been used in special elections earlier this year, and the city, the New York City Board of Elections, and the New York City Campaign Finance Board have engaged in education campaigns, including frequent television and online ads.
Here’s a look at what New Yorkers should know about the new system.
HOW SHOULD MY BALLOT LOOK?
Much of the new voting system is in its name. Voters will be asked to simply rank their top five choices for elected positions around the city like mayor, comptroller, borough president, and City Council. The new system will not yet be used for state or federal elections.
Given the crowded fields in some of this year’s primaries and the limit to five choices, voters will not be able to rank all the candidates in some of the races, such as the Democratic primary for mayor.
That is fine. Voters do not need to rank all the candidates. In fact, if a voter only wants to make one selection, that’s fine too. As always, fill in the bubble completely.
Below are two illustrations showing acceptable examples of the ballot. One shows five candidates ranked one through five, and the other shows a voter who only wanted to rank three candidates.
You do not have to assign all five rankings on your ballot. (Staten Island Advance/Paul Liotta)
You will be able to rank up to five candidates. (Staten Island Advance/Paul Liotta)
What voters cannot do is assign multiple rankings to the same candidate, or multiple candidates to the same ranking.
For example, voters cannot assign both first and second choice rankings in the Democratic mayoral primary to Andrew Yang, nor can they select both Eric Adams and Kathryn Garcia as their first choice.
If you do give the same candidate multiple rankings, the later rankings will simply not be counted. If you give multiple candidates the same ranking, it is considered an “over vote,” and your vote in that rank and later ranks cannot be counted.
Here are two examples of unacceptable ballots. The first shows multiple candidates with the same ranking, and the second shows one candidate with multiple rankings.
You will not be able to assign multiple rankings to the same candidate. (Staten Island Advance/Paul Liotta)
You will not be able to rank multiple candidates as the same choice. (Staten Island Advance/Paul Liotta)
HOW WILL VOTES BE TALLIED?
Again, much of how votes will be tallied is in the “ranked-choice” system’s name, and those elections already conducted around the city offer easy-to-understand illustrations of the count.
There have been more than five candidates in three of the elections already conducted using the system.
The shortest tally came in the March 23 race for the 11th City Council district, which covers the most northern part of the Bronx. In that race, there were six official participants on the ballot.
Like the other ranked-choice races, write-in first choice ballots were the first to be eliminated. From there, voter’s second choices were added to the total number of ballots for each candidate.
That process repeats itself until one of the candidates has more than 50% of the total ballots, and is declared the winner.
Screenshot shows an example of how ranked choice voting played out in the March 23 contest for a City Council race in the Bronx. (Courtesy: NYC Board of Elections)
WHAT ABOUT DISABLED VOTERS?
Voters who need to use AutoMark Ballot Marking devices will also be able to participate in the ranked-choice voting system. Each choice will be represented on a different screen on which one candidate will be chosen, according to the BOE.
WHY RANKED-CHOICE VOTING?
Simply put, ranked-choice voting is now the system for local elections, because the city voted for it.
In 2019, New Yorkers were faced with five ballot questions — the first of which concerned changes to the city’s electoral system. The shift to ranked-choice represented the most significant change.
The proposals are a result of the state-authorized 2019 Charter Revision Commission that proposed the charter revisions.
About 74% of voters said they were in favor of the changes on the ballot question. Staten Island was the only borough to vote against the change with about 54% against the changes.
In addition to changes in the voting system, there have also been changes to the campaign process. Some organizations and elected officials around the city have made ranked-choice endorsements of the various candidates in this year’s mayoral race.
State Sen. Diane Savino gave her second-choice mayoral endorsement to former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia earlier this month after having already made her first-choice endorsement for Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
State Sen. Diane Savino announces her second-choice endorsement of former DSNY Commissioner Kathryn Garcia outside Staten Island Family Court on Sunday, April 18, 2021. (Staten Island Advance/Paul Liotta)
Proponents of the system, like the organization FairVote, have argued that it promotes majority support, discourages negative campaigning, and provides voters with more choices.
Six members of the City Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus filed a lawsuit in December alleging the city’s Board of Elections (BOE) and Campaign Finance Board (CFB) hadn’t done enough to educate the public about the new system.
The courts ultimately dismissed that suit, but a PIX 11, NewsNation and Emerson College poll in March found significant portions of New Yorkers hadn’t even heard about the new system, particularly among Black and Latino New Yorkers.
One of the council members on that lawsuit, Alicka Ampry-Samuel (D-Brooklyn), appeared during a mayoral press briefing in April announcing an expanded education effort on the program, and applauded the $15 million investment in ranked-choice voting education.
She served as the primary sponsor for a city law first introduced last year that required an education campaign on the voting system
“When voters went to the polls in 2019, they could not have predicted that a global pandemic would shift reality,” she said.
“The pandemic highlighted a lot of insecurities mainly related to how information flows down to certain communities, especially in hardest hit areas...communities of mostly people of color. We already have a long, torrid history of disenfranchisement, so to circumvent that, this level of funding and this engagement is needed.”
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