Five days into early voting, Mayor Eric Adams is stopping short of encouraging voters to take full advantage of the city’s ranked-choice voting system in deciding primary races for City Council.
“I think voters should determine if they want to rank or if they don’t want to,” Adams told reporters on Wednesday. “It’s up to the voters.”
The mayor’s reticence on the relatively new voting procedure is not new — he’s had longstanding criticisms about the process, which allows voters to rank candidates by preference. But ranked-choice voting experts and advocates say by not ranking, voters are blunting the impact of their ballots.
“Ranking candidates increases the chance a voter will have a say in the final result, so we encourage everyone to carefully consider each candidate on their ballot and rank the candidates they feel deserve their support,” said Betsy Gotbaum, the executive director of Citizens Union, a good-government group that has sought to educate voters on the process.
The ranked choice system incentivizes voters to have a backup, allowing them to select as many as five candidates in order of preference.
Only voters who rank more than one candidate will maximize their chances of having an impact on the election. Under the system, if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, the winner is determined by elimination rounds that take ranked choices into account.
Ranking more than one candidate does not hurt a voter’s first choice.
Ranked choice ballots were introduced citywide for the first time in the 2021 mayoral primary after voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of implementing it. Proponents have argued that the system would force candidates to appeal to a broader swath of voters, eliminate costly runoff elections, and encourage a larger, more diverse pool of candidates.
City voters appeared to get the hang of the new system. In the 2021 mayoral primary, only 13% of voters elected to choose one candidate.
But Adams has been skeptical of the…
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