If NYC Elects A Far-Left Socialist, Blame Ranked-Choice Voting

New York City — the city that never sleeps — may be two weeks away from sleepwalking its way into advancing an open socialist in the mayoral Democrat primary. Voters would have ranked-choice voting to thank for the assist.

Zohran Mamdani, a New York state assembly member and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has promised everything from a rent freeze, free bus fare, and government-owned grocery stores. His socialist utopia would put the Empire State exodus on overdrive as productive taxpayers flee to lower-tax states.

Although the Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez-endorsed candidate would be a fringe long shot in most elections around the country, he has a real shot at winning in NYC because giving far-left outliers viability is a feature — not a bug — of ranked-choice voting.

The name “ranked-choice voting” intends to describe a process where voters rank multiple candidates for the same office. In reality, the manufactured majorities and trashed ballots of the hidden tabulation process have led to outcome errors, multiple recounts, and delayed results. It replaces the time-tested principle of one person, one vote with a convoluted process, better suited to an academic theory than an actual American election.

Counting this ranked order of candidates requires multiple rounds of tabulation via computer algorithm. This algorithm drops the lowest vote-getter in each round and reapportions their votes to other candidates until someone reaches 50 percent plus one. This system artificially manufactures a majority winner. Even worse, if a voter doesn’t rank every candidate on his ballot, that ballot may be discarded by the final round, resulting in voter disenfranchisement.

If you think electing a socialist in New York City seems farfetched, look no further than Portland, Maine, where a fringe candidate received only four percent of the vote but won a seat after multiple rounds of tabulation.

Beyond aiding fringe candidates, ranked-choice voting’s track record is riddled with problems. In a 2021 Democrat primary for NYC mayor that took nearly a month to conclude, 140,000 ballots were “exhausted”— nearly 15 percent of the total. A 2022 special election for Alaska’s at-large congressional seat resulted in a Democrat winner, despite 60 percent of votes for a Republican candidate in the first round. Nearly 15,000 ballots were tossed in the trash during a two-week process to declare a winner.

Ranked-choice voting threatens any hope of trustworthy elections. Alameda County, California, made headlines in 2023 when the results of a school board election were overturned. Errors in the ranked-choice voting system had led to the wrong candidate being declared the winner, but the mistake wasn’t caught for nearly two months.

Two years later, Alameda County again stalled in its recent special election for mayor because of ranked-choice voting. Candidates were resigned to a “long week” of tabulation, and FairVote offered an extremely convoluted analysis of the results after a candidate dropped out and a winner was declared. It may not be the wrong candidate winning this time, but the traditional system of one person, one vote isn’t nearly this dramatic. 

Time and again, ranked-choice voting places the burden on American voters, requiring them to know not just who they want to win, but also every single candidate and the order in which they’d want them to win. It forces voters to vote for candidates they oppose, even those whose views are diametrically opposed to their fundamental beliefs.

There is good news, though. By and large, states are rejecting ranked-choice voting.

Last year, voters in six states rebuffed ballot measures to adopt ranked-choice, and lawmakers in Missouri passed a statewide ban on ranked-choice voting. This year, lawmakers in Arkansas, Kansas, North Dakota, West Virginia, Iowa, and Wyoming have already passed statewide bans, bringing the total number of states with a ban on ranked-choice voting to 17.

Several other states are also working to pass bills banning ranked-choice voting, and the odds are good that additional states will join forces against the voting scheme.

Yet despite widespread opposition and repeated failures, the left keeps pushing ranked-choice voting to serve its political interests, not the voters’. But election systems aren’t experiments. They’re the launchpad of our democracy. Tampering with the fundamentals risks catastrophic failure.

How many times do we have to sift through the wreckage before we admit ranked-choice voting just doesn’t work? Confused voters, discarded ballots, and delayed results aren’t unfortunate side effects — they’re inherent in the system.

The possibility of an open socialist leading one of America’s most important cities should be a wake-up call to voters and state legislatures across the nation to hold the line and reject any electoral system that sacrifices accuracy, voter confidence, and the principle of one person, one vote.

Madeline Malisa is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability