In “Election Night,” the seventh episode of the fourth season (2002) of The West Wing, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman becomes increasingly frustrated at his polling site as he is buttonholed by Democrat voters who tried, but for various reasons failed, to vote for President Bartlet’s re-election. One voter tried to vote for the President on multiple party lines, another believes they can leave the whole ballot blank as long as they vote for a Democrat in a different race, while a third doesn’t realize that they had to register in advance. Eventually, they all reveal that they are actually members of an acting troupe paid by Communications Director Toby Ziegler, to play a prank on Josh’s election-night nerves. In classic Sorkin fashion, none of this makes sense if you think about it too hard (people don’t talk to each other at polling sites, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff is not a recognizable celebrity to normal people even in DC, and Florida 2000 mishap aside, ballot design is usually pretty intuitive), but it works. Josh leaves the polling site having explained things to lots of people, gets increasingly frustrated, and eventually loses it completely, screaming at everyone as he storms out in a puddle of anxiety and despair at the state of the American electorate and the complexity of the voting system.
We can only imagine how freaked out Josh would be if he was working on a race that had ranked choice voting, like this month’s NYC Democratic Primary. The potential for well-intentioned voters to waste their vote, or worse, actively undermine their interest is much higher. This has led some pretty high-profile commentators in New York media to criticize this system. “New York Is Not a Democracy,” ran the headline of today’s piece by Atlantic columnist and First Lady of podcast nation Annie Lowrey. In an interview with the New Republic, Daily News opinion writer and FAQ NYC podcast host Harry Seigel was even harsher on ranked choice voting: “It is too much to think about. It is too much to explain. It demands complicated sentences.”
But just as Josh woefully underestimated the electorate (the people he talked to were only pretending to be confused; the real voters reelected Bartlett with ease), these people are all wrong. And I accept Harry’s challenge. I think RCV is amazing, and I will explain how it works, why it is good, and how you should think about voting, without using any complicated sentences.
How Does Ranked Choice Voting Work
All the first place votes are counted, the person in last place is eliminated, and each of their votes is re-allocated to that ballot’s second place choice. Then, whoever is in last is eliminated again, and this process repeats until someone wins a majority (over 50%) of votes in a round. There. Done.
Not simple enough? Lucky for you, the digital teams in political media are dying to help you. Here’s an explainer from a cartoon owl from PBS. NY1 took a swing by ranking gross-looking midtown lunch options. Here’s former Labor Secretary Robert Reich ranking the cuteness of various pets. Here’s Zohran explaining it entirely in Urdu by consolidating cups of mango lassi. Here’s a piece about a drag show where the crowd was encouraged to rank performers and choose a winner through RCV. Pick your favorite, watch it a few times, send it to your group chats. Do not let anyone tell you it’s too complicated to understand.
Why do this?
So you can express preferences! In the New Jersey gubernatorial primary I wrote about on Monday, there were six candidates, and whoever won the most votes won (first-past-the-post voting). I know two New Jersey voters who would have preferred progressive mayor of Newark Ras Baraka over moderate congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, but voted for Sherril anyway because they wanted to make sure that ultramoderate-slash-conservative congressman Josh Gottheimer and State Senator Steve Sweeney (say that five times fast) didn’t sneak through. Ranked choice solves this. If you rank Baraka first, and Sherrill second, your vote starts with Baraka, but then also counts for Sherrill in the event that she needs it against Gottheimer. You don’t have to guess whether or not you’d be a spoiler.
There’s an even more proximate example than New Jersey’s race. No matter who wins, all signs point to Cuomo continuing his campaign on his newly created Fight and Deliver Party. Meanwhile, the Working Families party will not endorse him even if he does win the primary, and will almost certainly run someone else, probably Mamdani. So at least two candidates will (probably) emerge from this primary and run in the general election, where they will square off against incumbent mayor Eric Adams, Republican, vigilante enthusiast, and cat freak Curtis Sliwa, and bespeckled, aura-less lawyer Jim Walden. It will be a total shit show, and at some point, a poll will show Sliwa with 28% and yet somehow still within 5 points of the lead, at which point Mamdani voters will be harshly instructed to consolidate behind Cuomo (or Adams) to prevent Sliwa from winning. Mamdani voters will have polls of their own, showing him leading Cuomo (or Adams), and urging their voters to consolidate behind him instead. These polls will then be deemed bogus and rigged, crosstabs will be analyzed, unskewers will unskew, and it will be exhausting and bad. Harry Seigel will beg for a system that demands complicated sentences over one that makes everyone miserable and very possibly elects a Republican nut job that no one wants to be mayor.
No system is perfect, and there are all sorts of edge cases where ranked choice selects a goofy winner. For example, let’s imagine that it ends up being a three person race between Cuomo, Mamdani, and Lander. Cuomo has 45% of first place votes and all of them rank Lander second, Mamdani has 40% of the first place votes and all of them also rank Lander second, and Lander has 15% of the first place votes, and his voters are split evenly between Cuomo and Mamdani second. In this scenario, Lander would get eliminated, Cuomo would receive half of his votes and win narrowly, even though every single voter had Lander either first or second. More people would probably be happier with Lander, the compromise candidate, in this scenario. On the other hand, this is the price he pays for not having more first place votes! And even in this example, no one has to worry about being a spoiler. This is good, because it’s annoying to have to think about the spoiler effect (more on that later).
How Should I Fill Out My Ballot If I Don’t Want Cuomo To Win
It depends on how much you want to think about this. I will present many levels of thought, and the good news is that you can stop whenever you feel overwhelmed, and still feel reasonably good about your vote.
Level one: Don’t rank Cuomo. Pretty simple. If you rank Cuomo, there’s a chance your other candidates get eliminated and he gets your vote, which you don’t want to have happen if you don’t want him to be mayor. If you don’t rank him there’s no way he gets your vote.
Level two: Don’t rank Cuomo and do rank all the other viable candidates. There are only five spots and more than five candidates on the ballot, which means that it is possible for all five of your candidates to get eliminated before the final round. You want your vote to count in the final round. So you want to make sure that the non-Cuomo candidate that makes it to the final round is on your ballot somewhere. Who will that non-Cuomo candidate be? We don’t know, but you have five slots, and the good news is you really only need three: Adrienne Adams, Brad Lander, and Zohran Mamdani are the only candidates that have a serious chance of making the final round. To be honest, Brad and Adrienne don’t have much of a chance, it will almost certainly be Zohran. But you should include Brad and Adrienne anyway, because there is a (very) small chance that cross-endorsements, ad blitzes, or other developments cause a last-minute consolidation behind one of them that drives one of them past Zohran in the penultimate round. For good measure, you should probably also include Scott Stringer, because his campaign has a lot of money in the bank right now, and like, who knows. On this level, the order does not matter, as long as you include Zohran, Brad, and Adrienne (and I guess Scott, but it feels incredibly dumb for me to write that), your vote will go to whichever of them makes the last round (it’s gonna be Zohran), which means you will vote against Cuomo!
Level Three: Don’t rank Cuomo, rank all the other viable candidates, and rank them in the order that they are most likely to beat Cuomo in that final round.
You can read Jesse Richardson and Joel Wertheimer for more detail on this level. But the basic idea is that if there’s a candidate that has broad appeal and can beat Cuomo head-to-head, you need to make sure that candidate actually makes the final round.
Last election, the final three candidates were Maya Wiley, Kathryn Garcia, and Eric Adams. All my friends and I ranked them in that order, because Wiley was the exciting progressive with AOC’s endorsement, Garcia was the boring technocrat in the style of Michael Bloomberg, and Adams was, even at that time, clearly bad news. Despite this, Garcia narrowly beat Wiley in the penultimate round, and then came within 7000 votes of Adams in the final round, an excruciatingly close loss. Afterwards, the elections board published the full results, which showed a fascinating dynamic. Had Wiley beaten Garcia in the penultimate round, Garcia’s votes would have broken for Adams much more than Wiley’s did, and Adams would have crushed Wiley by a much wider margin than he did Garcia. So my vote for Wiley over Garcia in that round actually acted counter to my preference of Garcia over Adams. Wiley, as a candidate who could not win in the final round, was acting as a spoiler to Garcia, a candidate who (almost) could. If I truly cared about preventing Adams from becoming mayor, I should have ranked Garcia over Wiley, even though I preferred Wiley.
The problem with this logic is that it only works in retrospect. I did not know when I voted who would make the penultimate round, and how each of those candidates’ voters would fill out the rest of their ballots. Richardson and Wertheimer encourage their readers to make guesses, and they guess that Adrienne Adams is the candidate with the best chance of having a broad, Garcia-like coalition that can beat Cuomo, while Zohran Mamdani risks having a Wiley-like ceiling. In other words, they guess that Adrienne’s voters are more likely to break to Cuomo if she’s eliminated than Zohran’s voters are if he’s eliminated.
This makes sense if you imagine the candidates on a linear left-to-right political spectrum. All of Zohran’s voters are to the left of Adrienne, so they will go to her because she is to the left of Cuomo, but Adrienne’s voters are in between, so they could go either way.
But I’m not sure most voters are thinking about the election this way. I think many of Zohran’s voters like him because he’s charismatic, says what he thinks, and has flashy, eye-catching ideas that people really like. Many of these voters probably also like Cuomo for similar reasons, he’s a familiar face, he “got us all through Covid,” and he talks common sense, unlike all of these elitist, professional class nerds. Just as there were tens of thousands of AOC-Trump voters in 2024, I believe there will be many Zohran #1 Cuomo #2 ballots (and Cuomo #1 Zohran #2 ballots). And with Zohran crushing Adrienne in first place ballots, only a small percentage of Zohran ballots need to have Cuomo over Adrienne for Zohran to become the more optimal anti-Cuomo candidate in the last round. I think there is not that much reliable polling on this question, and it could genuinely go either way. Which brings us to…
Level Four: Don’t rank Cuomo but ignore Level Three and just pick your five favorites, while obeying Level Two and including Brad, Zohran, and Adrienne in some order.
This is where I landed. The strategy is too opaque, it almost certainly won’t matter anyway, and I want my earnest preferences to be logged somewhere. The vote share for candidates I like who won’t win matters at least a little for narratives, and for their viability in future races. Those future races include this year’s general election, which will probably feature at least one of these people, and this is my chance to say who of those three I want it to be.
In the end, I went:
Brad Lander
Zellnor Myrie
Zohran Mamdani
Adrienne Adams
Scott Stringer
Thank you, Eli!