New York City’s experiment in rank choice voting applies to all municipal offices, but only in Party primaries, and in special elections, which are non-partisan. It does not apply to the main event; general election are still “first past the post.”
Yes, you can argue that, in NYC, Democratic primary elections are, in fact, the main event.
But, they are a main event with a closed guest list.
Virtually all the arguments in favor of rank choice voting apply just as much to general elections as they do to primaries.
Voters should be able to enthusiastically support the candidate they actually prefer, without worrying that their vote will be wasted, and that the waste of such a vote will help to elect someone they would not prefer.
By allowing someone’s vote to be passed to a voter’s next preferred alternative, sometimes multiple times, rank choice voting helps communities get their consensus choice, rather than facing the too frequent phenomenon of a candidate who does not reflect the community being elected because their opposition fragmented.
In a rank choice race, the Naders and the Steins of the world can get their probably much larger true votes, without facilitating the election of the Bushes and the Trumps. Maybe sometimes, having received their true votes, they might even win in the end.
Rank choice general elections could facilitate choices which might benefit candidates outside of the major parties, something which might broaden the ideological range of our electeds.
Rank choice general elections might not only benefit the right and and left, but the center.
For example, instead of a Tiffany Caban nearly winning a DA race with 38.5% of the votes, the more likely results would be her losing by about 20 points in the last round.
In an all-party rank choice system, the ideological activists who often have magnified influence in primaries might find themselves outnumbered by moderate voters from each party, and from neither party, who suddenly could form coalitions across traditional Party lines (this, of course, pre-supposes that moderate Republicans still exist in sufficient quantities to be statistically significant, an iffy proposition at best). In some districts, the Green Party might win, but in others, the sharp edges of ideology might fall victim to candidates who taste more like vanilla.
In most places, rank choice would seem to expand the playing field.
Of course, as Heisenberg might opine, in some cases it could result in the opposite effect.
In 2006, a local white Council Member named David Yassky ran a credible race for Congress in a black majority Brooklyn district, likely hoping for a minority victory by virtue of a divided Black vote; under rank-choice, the shrewd calculation underlying such a move would likely give way to a similarly calculated decision not to bother.
Anyway, one must ask, if rank choice is so great, why not extend it to everyone?
Now, I’ve long been an opponent of open primaries, feeling that as long as we have “first past the post” general elections, each party should get to put the choice of its membership before the voters. Closed primaries also prevent Party raiding designed to see that the other Party selects its weakest candidate.
I’ve also opposed non-partisan “first past the post” elections, where, it is possible that a divided field with multiple candidates from the area’s majority Party could divide their votes, electing someone from a Party not representative of the area’s majority consensus, like when Republican Andrew Eristoff won a special Council election against six Democrats with 28% of the vote.
But I do not necessarily oppose all-party “jungle primaries,” or other system which allow all candidates from all parties, and no parties, to run together, if those systems provide a method to make sure the final choice reflects the area’s consensus, rather than the first one to mange to cross the finish line with a small minority of the vote.
This is, after all, an election, not a track meet. Elections should allow constituencies to select a candidate who reflects their views and interests; systems should not be set up which facilitate the opposite result.
The problem is that some of these systems do that better than others. A few years ago, California, which has all-party “jungle primaries.” had a Congressional primary in a Democratic-leaning seat where two strong Republican competed against a large gaggle of Dems, resulting in the two GOPers having a narrow lead, and voters then had to chose between them in a runoff where the majority of voters were unable to elect a member of the House reflecting their choice of which Party was to lead that Congress.
There are better ways than runoffs of insuring that representatives are representative; most of them involve some form of rank choice voting, of which there are several variations.
The variation cautiously and slowly rearing its head in NYC these days is called “Final Five,” which is a modified version of the Alaska system which in 2022 allowed the same electorate to elect a moderate Republican for the Senate at the same time it elected a moderate Democrat to the House, finally burying the zombie apocalypse we call Sarah Palin once and for all.
Almost sounds a bit tempting.
The team behind Final Five includes progressives, liberals, conservatives, moderates and those who haven’t a clue what they are (e.g., Andrew Yang), Democrats (from left/liberal to DINO). It includes Republicans, Libertarians, the politically gender non-conforming (e.g., Ari Kagan) and those who seem to want to destroy Parties as we know them (e.g., Andrew Yang).
Brownstoners may be impressed by the presence of one of our own Members of the Assembly Bobby Carroll, contributing a wonky, good-government oriented endorsement.
Probably impressive only to political trivia nuts is the group’s Chair, former Bay Ridge Councilman Sal Albanese, who last won office in 1997, and has since become the Harold Stassen of NYC politics, losing elections both primary and general elections for Mayor and last seen getting creamed in a race for City Council on Staten Island (when he’s not busy leading some group of Democrats endorsing some Republican candidate).
They are promising one day to circulate a petition to put Final Five on the ballot so that it can be enacted as part of the City Charter.
But while, outside of Carroll, most of Final Five’s supporters are hard to take seriously, the same cannot be said of their proposal, which, with some caveats, is not without some real appeal.
Still, there is no word when they will circulate such a petition; rumors are that the money to run a petition operation and a subsequent campaign are coming slowly, if at all, as Sal and Company try to drum up support with email blasts to spam filters and by appearances at local political clubs and civic groups.
So, we may be voting on this one day, but probably in no time soon.
So what exactly is Final Five?
In “Final Five” there is a non-partisan primary where every voter is allowed to cast a single vote, and then the top five candidates come back in November to compete in a rank choice race.
Why not save the taxpayers a lot of money, and just do one rank choice race from the get go?
Final Fivers feel that too many candidates, a likely result of the system they created, can result in voter confusion, so the first round would be a sorting mechanism and then voters could make an informed choice among five options which, for some reason, they’ve determined is the sweet spot between too meager a menu and one too abundant (In Alaska, the sweet spot was determined to be four, but I guess there are more of us than there are of them, so whatever).
But hey, why not reflect voter opinion even more accurately by using rank choice in both rounds? In the first round, we could just stop eliminating choices until we’d sorted it down to the “Final Five,” or whatever number tastes the sweetest. Less chance then of voters dropping a candidate they prefer for strategic reasons.
Anyway, I had some qualms about the rank choice system we currently have. Why restrict voters choices to five choices? The last time we used such a system (School Board Elections), we allowed voters unlimited choices, resulting in fewer exhausted ballots.
But, ultimately it was clear that we’d probably get only one chance at getting rank choice, and there was no point making the perfect the enemy of the good. So, I voted yes and urged folks to support the imperfect plan we got.
So, while I’d like to tinker with the toy Sal and Company have put on display, ultimately my position is “Compared to What?” and on that basis, I kinda like Final Five, though I think it might benefit from some more appealing public faces.
