Here’s how it works: Rather than being forced to choose a single candidate on your ballot, you rank some or all of the candidates, from most preferred to least. If one candidate has an outright majority of first-place votes, he or she wins. If not, the candidate with the fewest number of first-place votes — call her Candidate C — is eliminated. The ballots that listed Candidate C first are then transferred to whichever candidate those voters listed second. The process repeats, with the last-place candidate being eliminated and his or her ballots transferred to the next highest-ranking candidate on those ballots, until one candidate has a majority of support.

It may sound confusing, but nearly everywhere ranked-choice voting has been used, from the San Francisco Bay Area to Minneapolis to Santa Fe, N.M., voters get it, and they like it. In Maine, voters tried it out in congressional elections in 2018, and it was popular enough that they decided to use it for next year’s presidential election.

When voters are able to express their preferences more fully, they feel more connected to the political process, so it’s no surprise that turnout tends to go up where ranked-choice voting is used. More voter participation is badly needed in New York City, where the proportion of voters who turn out struggles to crack double digits in off-year elections. Pair that with a welcome increase in the number of candidates — the result of smart new public-financing laws — and it sometimes seems as though there are more candidates on the ballot than voters at the polls. This year’s special election for public advocate featured 17 candidates.

In multicandidate races like this, the winning candidate often has less than majority support. The mayoral race is required to hold a runoff if no candidate breaks 40 percent of the vote, but no similar cutoff exists for City Council races. This can create a “spoiler effect,” where an unpopular candidate can win with, say, 25 percent of the vote, solely because his or her opponents split the rest.

Ranked-choice voting solves this problem. At the same time, it forces candidates to run more positive campaigns, because they can’t afford to go negative against opponents whose supporters might be inclined to list them second or third. It also results in the election of more female and minority candidates, who often suffer from the perception that they aren’t “electable” in a traditional first-past-the-post race.