Pending some major unforeseen happening, come January, New York will most likely have a mayor named Mamdani.
Many New Yorkers, whether because of Zohran Mamdani’s deeply disturbing bias against Israel or because of the wildly unrealistic nature of his social and economic plans, will be sorely disappointed should the polls indeed prove prescient.
But a thought worth thinking here is that the front-runner would likely not be able to win the mayoral contest were it conducted using RCV, ranked-choice voting—the system in fact used in the mayoral primaries (New York City has used the system for primaries since 2021).
RCV allows voters to rank candidates—to choose not only a favorite, but second or third (or more) choices. If no candidate achieves a majority of votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and the ballots get re-counted. Voters who chose the eliminated candidate as their first choice now have their vote redistributed to their second-choice candidate. And if still no candidate receives 50% of the vote, the elimination and redistribution process continues.
Consider a chaburah making a siyum and ordering a large pizza. The eatery offers toppings but only on the entire pie. You like onions and are sort of okay with peppers, but you have a thing about mushrooms. Yanky sort of likes them, though, and Yudi’s ambivalent on the matter. Shimmie’s a pepper-only idealist but is an okay-with-mushrooms guy. Complicated, no? Your first choice would be onions-only, but, to prevent the dreaded Mamda—I mean, mushrooms, you’d allow peppers. Using ranked-choice voting, the likely result may not get everyone salivating but will avoid anyone facing an achilah gasah. Say the Hadran!
In a case like the New York mayoral campaign now ending, if ranked-choice had been in play and Curtis Sliwa, as polls predict, came in third in the first round, those who voted for him would likely have made Andrew Cuomo their second choice, increasing his chance in round two. And had Eric Adams remained in the race and made a weak first showing, his supporters, too, could have ended up boosting one of the other candidates not named Mamdani.
After one or two “runoffs,” so to speak, someone would have eventually reached 50%, and it would most likely not have been the currently expected winner.
Ranked-choice voting is used statewide in Alaska and Maine, as well as in dozens of cities and counties across the United States. It is also used by some other countries, like Australia and Ireland.
To be sure, if RCV were universally used, there would be times when a particular constituency, like, say, the Orthodox Jewish community, might not see its favorite candidate end up in office. But, all in all, worst-case scenarios would be avoided.
Aside from the “consensus result” upside of ranked-choice voting, there is another good reason to consider it: the incentive it provides for candidates to befriend or at least cooperate with, rather than attack, their fellow candidates.
It’s no secret that the game of politics over recent years has devolved from plain distasteful to utterly hideous. The fish, from the head on down, smells really bad. Blatant lies are told, baseless accusations are made, personal insults are hurled; coarseness and anger have permeated—no, become—the electoral atmosphere.
And some of the muddiest of the mud-throwing has been among candidates whose plans and policies are not necessarily terribly different. On the contrary, two similar candidates are incentivized by their very similarity to reach for whatever might help them, and that usually means vilifying, misrepresenting and even slandering their opponent.
But, in a ranked choice race with three or more candidates, those vying for the office have good reason to cooperate with other candidates, even to ally themselves with them. “Vote for me!” pleads Candidate A. “But if you want to vote for Candidate B, that’s okay. At least make me your second choice.” And Candidate B will likely reciprocate the courtesy.
And courtesy, currently, is about the very last word that would come to anyone’s mind when the subject is political races.
Make America Civil Again!
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