This year in New York City we’ll use ranked choice voting in the mayoral primary elections. The city’s first big test of the system was in 2021, when current Mayor Eric Adams was voted in as the Democratic nominee after eight rounds of tallying.
But even with a little experience and plenty of explainers, the process can still feel like a black box. And for good reason: When it comes to elections — especially national ones — we’re used to conversations about spoiler candidates, or how to optimize your primary vote to ultimately beat a challenger from another party.
So with ranked choice, is there any strategy that voters should use? Any way to game the system?
Many readers of THE CITY have asked. So, we spoke to experts to find out.
(Remember, ranked choice voting is used only in primary and special elections — we’ll use a traditional system in the general, which is shaping up to be competitive for the first time in over a decade.)
Reminder: How does ranked choice voting work?
Currently, there are nine Democratic mayoral candidates campaigning: Adrienne Adams, Michael Blake, Andrew Cuomo, Brad Lander, Zohran Mamdani, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos, Scott Stringer and Whitney Tilson. So how do you decide which ones deserve a place on your ballot?
“First, cut out those that you couldn’t live with, and you don’t rank them at all,” said Susie Gomes, chair of the city affairs committee at The League of Women Voters of the City of New York. “And then the rest, you have to decide in what order you could live with them.”
Here’s how the calculation works: Instead of picking one favorite candidate, voters rank five, from their top choice to their fifth choice.
Board of Elections workers help tally the first round of ranked-choice ballots in the Queens City Council District 31 race, March 16, 2021. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
The first round of tallying votes just looks at everyone’s first-choice candidate. If any candidate gets over 50% of the vote, they win then and there. But, if one candidate does not cross that 50% threshold, the tabulation moves to the next round, and the candidate who had the least first-place votes gets kicked out of the running.
“Everybody who ranked [that] candidate as their first choice, their votes in round two get reallocated based on their second choice, and the algorithm runs again,” explained Susie Gomes.
Because of this, even if your first-choice candidate gets kicked out of the running, you can still have a say in who wins the election.
“The strength of ranked choice voting is it allows candidates to consolidate a majority over a number of rounds,” explained Susan Lerner, the director of advocacy group Common Cause New York. “So your second and third choices in a ranked choice voting system are almost as important as your first choice.”
And then the process continues: If nobody reaches the 50% threshold in round two, the candidate with the lowest number of votes gets kicked off, and everyone who voted for that person now is casting their vote for their next highest-ranked remaining candidate.
“In ‘21, it took eight rounds for Adams to win,” said Gomes.
For more on how ranked choice voting works, we’ve got an in-depth guide that includes an interactive graphic of how the votes were tallied in 2021 — check it out here.
Is there any way to game the system?
According to experts, no, not really.
“I think that’s maybe just hard to absorb, and we’re used to thinking there’s some kind of trick in everything,” said Mark Schmitt, who runs the Political Reform program at New America.
The best way to make your voice heard for your preferred candidate(s) is just to rank them in the order you’d like to see them hold the office.
“There’s just no reason to do anything other than rank,” said Schmitt.
Lerner agrees: “New Yorkers are always looking for some special angle, and the thing about ranked choice voting is it’s designed to allow you to vote your values,” she said. “This one just doesn’t have an angle.”
Schmitt does have one tip.
“The only thing I would say, and this is coming up a lot in New York — if there’s somebody who you’d really, really object to, don’t rank them,” he said.
If you rank a candidate — even if you rank them last — there’s a chance your vote will get counted for that candidate. For example, if you had ranked then-Borough President Eric Adams last in 2021, you still would have ultimately contributed to his win.
“It’s designed to pick the candidate who the most people would find acceptable,” said Schimitt.
Does RCV have different outcomes than a “normal” vote?
That aim — to pick the candidate who is the most palatable to the most people — means that sometimes ranked choice voting can lead to different outcomes than a traditional election.
Before ranked choice voting in city primaries, if a candidate didn’t get over 40% of the vote, there would be a runoff election between the first and second place choices. Ranked choice voting essentially stages multiple runoff elections without voters having to return to the polls.
Schmitt points to then-Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for mayor in 2013, with no runoff election.
“The old rule was there’s a runoff if a candidate didn’t get 40% — Bill de Blasio got 41% and won without a majority,” he said.
In 2021, the civic group Citizens United analyzed that same 2013 primary, and found that 33% of voters cast ballots for candidates who didn’t make it to the top two slots — and so even if there had been a runoff, their votes wouldn’t have been counted.
In contrast, in 2021, about half as many voters fell into that category. In that year’s Democratic primary, just under 15% of voters had “exhausted” ballots, meaning that every candidate they ranked had been eliminated, according to the analysis — and therefore their vote did not contribute to the final matchup between Adams and runner-up Kathryn Garcia.
Voter strategy vs. campaign strategy
Compared to our traditional voting system, Lerner says that ranked choice should actually require less strategy for everyday people — especially if you’re someone whose first choice is often a “spoiler” candidate, or someone outside of the traditional party mainstream.
“In the traditional first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system, the voter is on the horns of a dilemma: Should I waste my vote for the candidate that I really care about? … Or should I vote for the lesser of two evils?” Lerner said.
“You are not in that contradictory decision-making process with ranked choice voting,” she continued. “Your vote is never wasted.”
But for candidates? That’s a different story — and ranked choice voting has changed the game.
“In a traditional campaign, a candidate is going to more likely, sadly, trash their opponent, because they want everything for themselves,” Gomes explained. “In ranked choice voting, really a candidate doesn’t have that choice to do that, because they need the other candidate’s voters to possibly rank them second or third.”
We have already seen this play out in New York. In the 2021 mayoral election, there was a last-minute alliance between candidates Kathryn Garcia and Andrew Yang, asking their supporters to rank the other “second” on their ballot for mayor.
As of now, we haven’t seen any candidates endorse their competitors, but organizations like unions and the Working Families Party have endorsed multiple candidates.
To Gomes, the kind of camaraderie we’ve seen so far would only be possible with ranked choice voting.
“You’ve seen that somewhat in this election, with a lot of the progressives standing firmly together, walking arm and arm to City Hall, sort of coalescing and making a statement like ‘We’re not one, but any one of us is sort of okay,’ — because they want all of their votes to come in a heap in any ranked order that you want,” she said.
And contrary to a traditional election, where an endorsement of multiple candidates can feel like a cop-out, group endorsements do make sense with ranked choice voting.
“Ranked choice voting does the work of consolidating the votes, so if you want to say ‘Progressives should consolidate around one mayoral candidate,’ in a sense, the system does that work for you,” explained Schmitt.
“Assuming the universe in which the four progressive candidates get 60% of the vote altogether, ultimately one of those four will win,” he said of the WFP’s slate.
Whether a universe like that will exist? That’s harder to predict. However, Gomes muses that groups like D.R.E.A.M. (which formerly stood for Don’t Rank Eric or Andrew for Mayor, and now have been rebranded to Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor) may be missing an opportunity in just telling folks not to rank Cuomo — without endorsing any other candidates.
“It depends on how many candidates ultimately make it to the ballot,” she said. (The full slate of candidates who get their names on the primary slate will be determined by election officials in early May.)
With so many people running, even if many voters follow D.R.E.A.M.’s guidance and choose not to rank Cuomo, their top five choices could vary significantly from another anti-Cuomo voter. And fewer votes for any one candidate means they get knocked off the ballot earlier.
“It really is an interesting question, because depending on how spread out all of these first choices are, and second choices, these Never Cuomo’s may want to refine their communications,” Gomes said.
D.R.E.A.M. hasn’t ruled out endorsing in addition to anti-endorsing. They’re considering picking “the five most viable candidates as a DREAM slate, but either way, the core Don’t Rank Evil Andrew strategy succeeds by taking away his votes,” said D.R.E.A.M. organizer Lawrence Wang in an email to THE CITY.
To D.R.E.A.M., there is “very much a strategy voters can employ: not ranking Cuomo.”
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