A discussion of ranked choice voting.
- More U.S. locations experimenting with alternative voting systems.
The recent Democratic primary for New York City mayor attracted even more attention than usual, as the nation’s biggest city also became the largest jurisdiction to use an alternative voting system known as ranked-choice voting (RCV).
This is the first time New York has used RCV. In this system, voters can rank more than one candidate in order of preference. (New Yorkers could rank up to five of the 13 candidates on the Democratic ballot. The GOP ballot had only two candidates, so RCV didn’t come into play.)
If one candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, that person wins, and no subsequent rounds are needed. If no one wins a majority of first-preference votes, the last-place candidate is dropped and their votes are reallocated to those voters’ second choices. If there’s still no majority winner, the process repeats with the new last-place candidate being eliminated – and so forth until someone has a majority. (This is why RCV is also called “instant-runoff voting.”)
Advocates for RCV and other alternative voting systems (such as “top-two” primaries, cumulative voting and approval voting) typically argue that they’re more fairly representative than the first-past-the-post (or “winner-take-all”) system that’s standard in most of the United States, and that they can encourage campaigns to appeal beyond their base voters to broader swaths of the electorate. Critics dispute both of those points and claim that unfamiliar and complex voting systems can depress rather than encourage turnout, especially in communities of color.
