Could ranked-choice voting solve the problem it created?

Many people, including me, have blamed ranked-choice voting (RCV) for Mamdani’s win during the 2025 NYC Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdani seemed to have an insurmountable lead after the first round of tabulation, but RCV didn’t exactly catapult him to victory.  Instead, it created the conditions for his win: encouraging more candidates to run (resulting in an eleven-person race) and fostering a more divisive environment (leading to the creation of the DREAM pact and cross-endorsements).

With the general election less than two weeks away and Zohran Mamdani heavily favored to win, some ranked-choice voting advocates, like FairVote, have begun pitching the system as a fix to the current problem. RCV’s tendency to elect far-left candidates runs counter to FairVote’s claim that it would help elect moderate, consensus candidates. Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who plans to make buses free, create government-run grocery stores, decriminalize prostitution, and subsidize gender transition surgeries, is the furthest thing from moderate.

Claiming that the lack of ranked-choice voting in the general will lead to vote splitting and decrease the chances of a moderate winning, FairVote touts ranked-choice voting as the solution to a problem created by ranked-choice voting. They also blamed Eric Adams dropping out on the fact that the system isn’t used in the general.

And that’s been their strategy all along, spending millions to implement their broken scheme on the local level with hopes of spreading it statewide, then eventually nationwide.

Arlington, Virginia, is a prime example. The county first used RCV during the 2023 County Board Democratic primary race; it was then expanded to the County Board general election. The initial implementation of RCV was marred by delays and voter confusion.

If you accept FairVote’s premise that ranked-choice voting could lead to better outcomes in a general election after it screwed up the primary election process, the only logical conclusion is to expand ranked-choice voting to statewide primaries, and when that results in extreme far-left candidates winning, it will spread to all statewide elections.

Ranked-choice voting has been a disaster for New York City and every other city that has adopted it. Unless New York joins the seventeen other states that have banned RCV, it’s bound to further entrench itself within the state.