An extensive voter education effort will be needed before the switch goes into effect, Burnett said. | Bebeto Matthews/AP Photo Ranked-choice voting adopted in New York City, along with other ballot measures

New York City will move to a system of ranked-choice voting, shaking up the way its elections are run after voters approved a ballot question to make the change.

The city will be by far the biggest place in the U.S. to put the new way of voting to the test, tripling the number of people around the country who use it.


A ballot question proposing the shift for New York primaries and special elections was approved Tuesday by a margin of nearly 3-1.

It’s now set to be in effect for New York’s elections for mayor, City Council and other offices in 2021.

Under the system, voters will rank up to five candidates in order of preference, instead of casting a ballot for just one.

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.

Ranked-choice voting is now in use or approved in 18 other cities around the country, including San Francisco, Minneapolis and Cambridge. The state of Maine also uses it.

Backers say the system discourages negative campaigning, and forces candidates to reach out to more voters rather than relying on a narrow base. It’s also designed to allow voters to pick their true favorite, without worrying about throwing away a vote on someone who can’t win.

“You’ve got to be, I think, a better candidate,” said FairVote President Rob Richie.

“You as a candidate have a lot more reasons to have conversations and engagements with people,” he said. “The candidates that run traditional campaigns that involve using money and not using people have not done as well.”

The plan will eliminate New York’s traditional runoff elections, which are held for citywide offices if no candidate cracks 40 percent of the vote. The Independent Budget Office estimated that that could save $20 million for each election cycle that would require a runoff.

But with the city Board of Elections already known for frequent fumbles, it could result in much longer waits for New Yorkers to find out who has won a primary.

In cities where ranked choice has been tried, it has sometimes resulted in unorthodox campaign tactics like multiple candidates banding together into alliances with competitors to jockey for second and third place votes.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill last month that would have allowed more cities and counties there to use the system, saying it created too much voter confusion.

A well-funded campaign backed by good government groups raised nearly $2 million to promote the question, bringing together pro-business groups on the one hand and progressive activists on the other.

But in the closing days of the campaign, opposition emerged from the City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, which said the change could hurt the chances of candidates of color.

“Our communities of color have flexed their considerable muscle at the ballot box over the last decade by electing the first Asian and black female citywide officials as well as a racially and ethnically diverse majority of the City Council’s membership. Yet some critics have suggested that those historic victories were ‘anti-Democratic’ because they were not decided by a majority of voters,” the group said in a statement.

“These outsiders know nothing about our communities and what is in their interest even less. With the next round of municipal elections two years away, if Ranked Choice Voting is adopted, it would dilute the electoral power of communities of color, and diminish black, Latino and Asian candidacies by offering a ‘traditional’ candidate as a ‘safe’ alternative to voters," the caucus said.

A study by FairVote found that in California’s Bay Area, candidates of color won 62 percent of ranked-choice races, compared to 38 percent before the switch.

But research by Craig Burnett, an associate professor of political science at Hofstra University, found that voters in black and Latino neighborhoods in San Francisco and Oakland are more likely to choose just one candidate and leave the rest of the ballot blank, whereas voters in white neighborhoods are more likely to maximize their influence by completing the ballot.

An extensive voter education effort will be needed before the switch goes into effect, Burnett said.

“They’ll be changing decades worth of history here, and some people will get it very easily, and some people won’t,” he said. “For a lot of voters who don’t have experience with this, who aren’t paying very careful attention, it’s going to be confusing.”

The referendum question was one of five proposed changes to the city charter on the ballot Tuesday. Also approved were measures to create a rainy day fund for the city budget, strengthen prohibitions on former city officials lobbying their former agencies, change the composition of the Conflicts of Interest Board and tweak the timeline for the city’s land use review process.

Fordham University associate political science professor Christina Greer said the new voting system has the potential to boost voter turnout.

“It makes the political process more robust, because you can’t have a candidate who says, ‘I’m just going to cater to Brooklyn, and I know they’ll come through for me,'” she said. “They can’t campaign just for their particular borough or their particular constituency. They’re going to have to diversify who they reach out to.”

She said fears about voter confusion are overblown. “At the end of the day, it’s not that complicated,” she said.