This is not the RCV you're looking for...
My campaign continues
There’s been a lot of discourse on here about the results of the NYC Democratic Mayoral Primary. But instead of delving into the candidates, I am using my little megaphone to make some observations about one of my soapboxes: Ranked Choice Voting with instant runoff (RCV). Before the results started coming in, I had been yelling to whomever would listen about the risk of exhausted ballots (due to people only marking one choice and leaving the other four slots blank) and that a particular socialist was likely to win on the second or third round.
In point of fact, the Democratic primary voters of NYC were more foolish hot for performative signaling than I had estimated, and the socialist posted a 7-point lead in the first round of vote counting. As I Noted at the time, it seemed that he would have won in an old-fashioned first-past-the-post primary.
Now that the other rounds have been tallied, it resulted in a lopsided 56-44 victory for the socialist. The older, whiter, ethically tarnished mainstream Democrat was clearly unpopular with voters who prioritize idealism over experience. It would be interesting to see how many people marked non-Mamdani candidates in the first slot and threw away the rest of their vote. Would it have been enough to flip the results?
The Gothamist is reporting that Mamdani supporters specifically campaigned for “anyone but Cuomo” ballots:
The ranked-choice results also showed that a campaign urging voters not to rank Cuomo anywhere on their ballots was effective. Altogether, Mamdani picked up another 99,069 votes from candidates who were eliminated. Cuomo picked up just 53,493 votes.
As should be expected, Fairvote1 praised the election as a win for RCV. Citing an exit poll by SurveyUSA, Fairvote reports that “82% say they ranked two or more candidates for mayor, with 45% reporting that they ranked five.” The fact that 18% of the voters potentially threw away most of their voting slots (if they didn’t rank the eventual winner in the first slot) or that 55% threw away at least one of their voting slots is apparently fine.
If that’s not concerning enough, the NYC Board of Elections actually encouraged people to produce exhausted ballots. Just look at the voter guidance they produced at https://vote.nyc/RankedChoiceVoting
Further on, they double down on this idea of only marking one choice (thus letting the rest of the ballot be “exhausted” if that choice doesn’t make the cut in pre-final rounds of voting):
The NYC Board of Elections explicitly telling voters “You do not have to rank all five” and “You can still vote for just one candidate and leave the other columns blank” puts a thumb on the scale in favor of wonky higher-educated PMC folks who have the leisure time to evaluate all the candidates and choose what order of priority they would rank them in. The busy lower working class parent who doesn’t treat politics like fantasy football is less likely to have strong opinions about who goes in each slot. And that means the deck is being stacked by exactly the kind of people who support socialist or progressive candidates. As long as progressive omnicause candidates keep winning in RCV elections, their voting base will feel validated that this system is an improvement on the old ways. Just look at how happy the Fairvote people are about nearly 1 out of 5 ballots running the risk of being exhausted before the final round.
You know who didn’t follow the rule of not listing the same candidate multiple times? NYC incumbent mayor Eric Adams! This appears to have been a joke, as he wasn’t even running in the Democratic primary, and had to put himself on as a write-in. According to the NY Post’s live blog, the NYC Board of Elections would only count a vote as Round 1 if a voter did this. But there was Mayor Adams, adding to the confusion.
So where does this leave me in my quest to undermine the “promise” of RCV? Without a smoking gun from NYC, will I keep resorting to wonky arguments about exhausted ballots, or pull out the shotgun approach of “LOOK AT WHO IS HAPPY ABOUT THESE ELECTION RESULTS, YOU FOOLS!” which won’t fly with liberals, but might get conservatives het up enough to campaign against it?
More work ahead.
The USA’s leading advocacy group for RCV.
Surprise surprise, the technocrat policy wonk solution muddles the process and favors the “politics as personality” crowd. Looking at who is most excited by RCV is the best heuristic to see its success.