RCV created the conditions for a Mamdani win
by Harry Roth
This past Tuesday, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo conceded the Democratic mayoral primary race to socialist Zohran Mamdani, who received 43.5 percent of the vote.
The race isn’t technically over, as none of the eleven candidates secured over 50% of the vote. The outcome will be determined by ranked-choice voting. However, Mamdani’s lead, combined with the cross-endorsements he received, makes his victory almost certain.
So, what did ranked-choice voting accomplish in this election? Quite a lot, actually.
New York City’s ranked-choice voting system encouraged more candidates to run, resulting in an eleven-person race. While this gave voters more options, it also made the process more confusing and laborious. With so many candidates on the ballot, the likelihood of errors by voters and tabulators increase, undermining the election’s integrity.
It’s too early to determine how many ballots will be exhausted, but the 2021 Democratic mayoral primary offers a lesson. In a city as large as New York, hundreds of thousands of ballots can be eliminated in a single election. This means hundreds of thousands of voters may once again be disenfranchised.
Another issue with RCV is cross-endorsements. Groups like FairVote champion cross-endorsements as an innovative feature of ranked-choice voting, but they often resemble corrupt backroom deals. For example, when Zohran Mamdani and City Comptroller Brad Lander chose to cross-endorse and campaign together, they even appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as a duo. What deals were made to secure this arrangement? Is Lander lined up for a posh position or some other benefit?
The lack of transparency raises serious concerns. Even when RCV doesn’t directly lead to the election of extreme candidates, as seen in the 2022 Oakland mayoral race, it creates a confusing, opaque, and corrupt process where the voters ultimately lose.