Ranked-Choice Voting Wins In NYC, Setting Up Big Election Changes

NEW YORK — New York City voters approved a proposal Tuesday to use ranked-choice voting in future municipal elections, setting the stage for a major overhaul of political campaigns in the nation's largest city.

New Yorkers had voted 473,948 to 170,529 in favor of changing the City Charter to let voters rank as many as five candidates for local offices starting in 2021 with about 90 percent of the ballots counted, according to unofficial results from the city Board of Elections.

The proposal was the most consequential among the five sets of amendments to the city's governing document that voters approved. Those changes will also expand police oversight powers, tighten government ethics rules, let the city establish a "rainy day fund," and tweak the public review process for development projects.

The Big Apple joins other major cities such as San Francisco and Minneapolis in adopting ranked-choice voting. Supporters of the measure praised the city for taking a significant step to bolster the local democratic process.

"New York City voters showed confidence in growing evidence that ranked choice voting can strengthen local democracy, eliminate the spoiler effect in large fields of candidates, and allow fresh energy to enter races while making sure that candidates who win do so with majority support from the community," said Rob Richie, the president and CEO of FairVote, a national organization that supports ranked-choice voting.

The 2021 races for mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and City Council will be the first major test run for ranked-choice voting. But the system will only apply to special and primary elections, not the general election.

Voters will be asked to choose up to five candidates for each office in order of preference. If no one wins a majority of the votes, the last-place candidate would be eliminated and people who ranked them first would have their votes counted for their second choice. That process would continue until there are only two candidates left, and the one with the most votes would be declared the winner.

The scheme's supporters say it encourages candidates for public office to reach out to broader swaths of voters while avoiding the need for costly runoff elections. The proposal went without any organized opposition until last week, when the City Council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus came out against it.

Some lawmakers worry ranked-choice voting will dilute the political power of communities of color while potentially confusing elderly and immigrant voters.

"Generations of New Yorkers who hail from these communities marched a long and bloodstained road to secure their right to vote," Council Member I. Daneek Miller, the co-chair of the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, wrote in the New York Daily News Saturday. "... Today the children and grand-children of these leaders refuse to be disenfranchised by ranked-choice voting."

But supporters of the measure say those fears are unfounded. Ranked-choice voting instead allows a wider variety of candidates to enter the political arena and ensures that those with the broadest appeal are elected, they argue.

"To suggest that Ranked Choice voting would be too difficult for immigrants and people of color is insulting, to argue that they would hurt the chances of people of color to get elected is the complete opposite of what evidence has show(n) us!" state Assembly Member Catalina Cruz, a Queens Democrat who is herself an immigrant, said on Twitter Monday.

Voters also made smaller-scale changes to how the city's government works as they approved the rest of the amendments proposed by a 15-member charter revision commission the City Council empaneled last year.

One measure gives the Civilian Complaint Review Board — the city's independent police oversight agency — to investigate false statements cops make in the course of the board's investigations. The agency currently has the power to probe police misconduct ranging from verbal abuse to the use of lethal force.

The proposal was adopted despite vigorous opposition from the city's largest cop union, the Police Benevolent Association, which urged voters not to further empower an "outrageously dysfunctional agency that is viewed as a 'kangaroo court' by both cops & complainants." In response, the review board sought to correct several "myths" about how it operates.

"This slate of reforms will make the (board) more efficient, make discipline more transparent, and bolster public confidence in the integrity of the agency’s process," board Chair Fred Davie said in a statement Tuesday.

Other amendments will ban ex-city officials from appearing before their former government agencies for two years instead of just one; allow the city to save money for use in future years; and give community boards more time to examine certain development projects going through the city's land-use review process.

Here are the unofficial results for all five City Charter amendment proposals as of Wednesday morning:

1. Election reforms: 473,948 in favor, 170,529 against
2. Civilian Complaint Review Board reforms: 474,879 in favor, 161,569 against
3. Government ethics: 483,626 in favor, 141,246 against
4. City budget: 443,417 in favor, 180,328 against
5. Land use process: 469,939 in favor, 145,340 against