Ranked Voting Presents Challenge for Board of Election
David R. Jones, The Urban Agenda
The 2020 presidential election marks the end of New York City’s traditional primaries, runoffs and special elections and the start of ranked-choice voting. Under the system, approved in a referendum last year by a near 3-to-1 margin, voters will choose multiple candidates in order of preference, instead of casting a ballot for just one choice.
Ranked-choice voting takes effect for the 2021 elections for mayor, City Council, and other offices. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the New York City Board of Elections is the lead agency responsible for educating the public. The board, whose staffers are chosen almost entirely by Democratic and Republican Party bosses, excels at ineptitude and the absence of accountability. An election stumble next year would only rekindle distrust and unfounded claims of fraud peddled by our outgoing President.
Ranked-choice voting works like this: Instead of just picking one of the candidates on the ballot, you rank up to five candidates in order of preference for mayor, comptroller, public advocate, borough president and members of the City Council. If no candidate gets a majority of the vote, the last-place candidate is eliminated and their votes are parceled out to the voter’s second choice, a computerized process that continues until one candidate has a majority and is declared the winner.
Left to its own devices, the Board of Elections will fail miserably at what is undoubtedly its biggest challenge in recent memory: teaching voters about the new system and running elections that foster public confidence. Already this year, the Board missed the final deadline to submit November general election results to the state, failed to mail 34,000 ballots until the day before the primary – disenfranchising voters – and sent incorrect ballots to nearly 100,000 other residents, spreading confusion.
For ranked-choice voting to succeed, New York City’s labor unions, nonprofit advocacy groups, community organizations and political parties of all stripes must unite to hold the Board of Elections responsible. The City Council is considering laws that give it and the Campaign Finance Board a roll in the public awareness campaign and standardizes unofficial election night results reporting. Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo also must step up instead of trading blame in the face of Board of Elections incompetence.
Ranked-choice voting will be an interesting experiment for New York City. Supporters say it discourages negative campaigning, forces candidates to reach out to voters beyond their narrow base and allows them to pick their true favorite without worrying about voting for someone who cannot win. The Independent Budget Office estimates it could save $20 million for each election cycle that would otherwise require a runoff. On the other hand, opponents say it negatively impacts candidates of color and creates confusion precisely by eliminating these runoff elections. Civil rights organizations are considering legal action, and the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus is calling for a delay.
New York City voters cast 2.97 million ballots in the 2020 general election, an increase of 7.5 percent, or 210,000 more votes than were cast in the 2016 presidential election. Hiccups in implementing ranked voting in 2021 could undermine those gains, whose roots date to work that began two decades ago to expand voter registration and participation of Black and Latino voters.
My organization, Community Service Society (CSS), began the drive to register and empower voters in the 1980s when the late Richie Perez, a former member of the Young Lords and dynamic community activist, started our Voter Participation Project (VPP) in the Bushwick-Cypress Hill sections of Brooklyn. Perez would later become CSS’s political director and take the program citywide. VPP registered approximately 250,000 NYC voters between 1988 and the mayoral election, won by David Dinkins, the City’s first and so far only Black mayor. Separately, CSS filed a lawsuit that successfully restored 312,000 voters purged from the voting rolls.
CSS is not alone. Dozens of other advocacy groups, labor unions, trade groups and community organizers actively work every election to expand democracy. There is much to do beyond expanded voter registration to get citizens to the polls. A study by NYC Nonprofits Turnout, a nonpartisan group, estimates that 21 percent of registered voters never actually cast a local election ballot in the decade from 2008 to 2018.
The 2021 elections present a pivotal opportunity to further involve Black, Latinx and low-income families in the process. The races promise to be heated, with several prominent Black and Latinx candidates for mayor and on the ballot for City Council.
In these times of economic crisis and social unrest, and faced with an entirely new system of electing our public leaders, we cannot afford to sit by idly as the Board of Elections demolishes what everyone has worked so hard and so long to achieve.