By TRENT ENGLAND AND JASON SNEAD | DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION
Remember the sales pitch for ranked choice voting? Sure, it’s more complicated, excludes voters, and delays results. But it’ll be worth it because ranked choice voting is supposed to help moderate, consensus candidates. So much for that.
Marxist extremist Zohran Mamdani is now the Democrat nominee for New York City mayor, with 43.5 percent of the vote. Well, sort of. Mamdani was ranked first by about 432,305 voters from among 1,026,783 who cast a ballot in the Democrat’s primary. Following ranked-choice voting retabulations, Mamdani’s share of the vote went up to 56% out of only 973,864 voters, producing the mirage of a Mamdani majority.
This is ranked choice voting’s new math. A normal election is simple addition: one vote, plus one vote, and so on until it’s done. With ranked choice voting, there are multiple rounds of addition—and subtraction.
Ranked choice voting tabulation starts by eliminating the least popular candidate, which really means eliminating the votes (first-place rankings) for that candidate. If affected voters ranked other candidates, their votes are shifted to their second-place rankings, and this repeats until a winner clinches a “majority.” But here is the kicker: along the way, if voters run out of rankings before the final round of tabulation, their ballots are eliminated from the final results. It’s as if those people never voted—all to make it appear that the winner has majority support. Their votes simply disappear from the final results.
With ranked choice voting, your right to vote does not include the right to have your vote count for an unpopular candidate. Nor does it include the right to timely and reliable election results.
It’s clear that Mamdani is going to be the Democrat’s nominee. Voters used longer, more complex ballots, and none of it matters. The initial result is almost certain to stay the same when ranked choice tabulations are completed. This was true four years ago, when Eric Adams had an even greater lead in first-place votes and, eventually, won in the ranked choice process as well.
At least when ranked choice voting is superfluous, results can be quick and decisive. If the election was closer, the multi-round tabulation could lead to weeks of uncertainty. Delays and complexity are a recipe for distrust. After Maine adopted ranked choice voting, a researcher at the MIT Election Lab found it produced “significantly lower levels of voter confidence, voter satisfaction, and ease of use.”
In Oakland, Calif., voters can be forgiven for losing confidence. Ranked choice voting there led to the wrong winner taking office. It started with a few hundred voters who didn’t rank a candidate first but did rank one second. Election officials made their own mistake, incorrectly programming their ranked choice voting tabulation software. These errors, only possible with ranked choice voting, threw off all the final counts and changed the result in one school board race.
The failure almost went undetected, because ranked choice voting tabulation happens inside the “black box” of a computer. Outside experts stumbled on it and notified the county nearly two months after the election. In all, it took four months, a voluntary resignation by the wrong winner, a court order, and dumb luck to fix this ranked choice voting mess.
New York City’s first experience with ranked choice voting flirted with a similar disaster. Before it was reversed, a tabulation glitch threatened to knock current Mayor Eric Adams out of contention. And even after the City spent $15 million to teach people how to use ranked choice voting, many simply don’t do it.
Ranked choice voting makes voting harder, affecting some citizens more than others. The data is clear: minority, low-income, and less-educated voters are more likely to have their ballots eliminated. Their voices are diluted, their influence diminished, according to another analysis. All this is supposed to be worth it because ranked choice voting will somehow produce moderate, consensus winners.
Mamdani appears to be the first choice of about 14% of New York City’s 3 million registered Democrats. In other words, he’s not even the consensus choice of his own party. His positions are so extreme that Gov. Kathy Hochul has thus far declined to endorse him. Mamdani wants government to run grocery stores, confiscate guns, shut down prisons, and allow prostitution. After the vicious Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack, Mamdani blamed Israel’s government for “ongoing violence” in the region.
Ranked choice voting has failed New York City. It burdens voters without providing any real benefit, threatens to delay results by weeks, and increases the risk that some hidden mistake will cause a true election disaster. No wonder voters in six states refused to adopt it last year, and 17 states have banned it. Many cities have tried ranked choice voting and then repealed it. New York City should join them.
Jason Snead and Trent England are Co-Chairs of the Stop RCV Coalition.
Ranked choice is crap but there has to be a better way than the two party dem/republican system. (The uniparty).
A white majority nation might allow themselves to be governed by it as they are rule following, tax paying, obedient and far too trusting of the msm, however the third world melting pot mystery meat America will tolerate no such bs, they are here to change everything and conquer, they are very aware of this, they will vote along racial and anti establishment lines. Wait until they have a left wing populist more popular than trump. The boomers are dying and America will be about 120 million whites or less, you’ll be powerless as foreign, colored Marxist revolutionaries take over most public offices. When they start with South Africa style racial equity laws .. oh wait that’s exactly what the mayor of New York is doing ..
Conservatives think identity politics is bad but every other living thing lives by identity politics. If you won’t fight for your blood and heritage and a nation for it to carry on in what are you fighting/ working for? You like being a tax farm for Israel and paying for your own ethnic replacement? Choose, third world America or White America, you won’t have the luxury of ignorance soon.
It is a grave mistake to lump people into political categories based upon the level of melanin in their skin. Its a fact that vast numbers of white Americans are avowed Marxist communists while vast numbers of colored Americans are freedom-loving constitutional patriots.
Rank choice voting allows one voter to cast several votes for each office. No more one person, one vote. it is now one person, up to five votes.
CBMTTek, your description is false. No one gets more than one vote. Rather, RCV re-assigns your vote when your 1st choice fails… until a candidate gets 50%+1. The real fallacy with RCV is that it does not even produce a winner with 50%+1 vote because only 45% of registered voters even bother to vote. See ‘https://mustreadalaska.com/by-the-numbers-just-how-many-voters-are-on-alaskas-voting-rolls-today/
More lipstick on pigs, from the self-promotional piece from the digital propagandist (that was not published in a peer reviewed journal and over-states the implications of voter confusion) to the nonsense about votes being eliminated.
To be frank, this is simply further misinformation designed to inflame a base of largely uninformed (and based on the arguments made, incompetent voters).
The RCV in use in Alaska, as everyone from the LWV to the LtGov’s Office have made clear, does virtually exactly what Alaska’s run-off process did withiut the added expense.
As any student of Mathematics will tell you (here’s a basic text ‘https://math.libretexts.org/Courses/Las_Positas_College/Math_for_Liberal_Arts/11%3A_Voting_Systems), there are no perfect voting schemes. RCV, however, is often regarded as the best choice because it largely avoids the “undemocratic” aspects of the others.
Many Republics fear RCV for just that reason; it gives herd to Madison’s dire projections and makes it difficult to force voters to cast ballots for candidates they clearly don’t prefer. RCV in other words inhibits the foisting of extremist candidates on the polity who seek to take advantage of factionalism to two party systems.
The straw man in this scenario is Mamdani, who, based on the issues polling is far more centrist than Donald Trump and his Fox News cabinet. Of course, the right does not want to acknowledge the incredibly weak showing Trump had in the polls, arguing instead for an overwhelming popular mandate (which, like so much of the landscape offered by the #magats, never existed).
So the right rages on, using loaded messaging to paint candidates with centrist positions as dangerous, much the the same way those of us old enough saw MLK Jr portrayed.
Most US voters are tired of the bigoted attacks. There is no freedom of religion if all Muslims are regarded as terrorists, and no freedom of speech where anyone opposing rentiership is regarded as a thief.
“As any student of Mathematics will tell you…”.
You are obviously not a student of mathematics.
“Mamdani, who, based on the issues polling is far more centrist than Donald Trump” I’ve seen some pretty ignorant things written by lefties, this might just take the cake.
If you’d like to inject mathematics into this mix you suggest that your audience familiarize themselves with game theory relevant to voting process and statistics. RCV is bad in every respect and misrepresents voter intent.
Ranked Choice Voting stops nonpartisans from voting in federal primary elections, like the 2024 presidential primary, unless they literally stop being nonpartisan and join a political party to caucus with them.
Manda, you are truly uninformed. Before RCV, any Undeclared or Non-partisan could vote in any Republican primary held, whether state or federal. That is 83% of all voters in Alaska. In 2024 we had to do RCV for federal races including President. That would make me a Republican have to vote for a democrat for President had I actually ranked the two people running.
I am a political scientist by degree and experience but I do not understand rank choice silliness. Supposedly it eliminates the need for runoffs. If I get more votes than anyone else I should win. The stupidity of Georgia’s 50% plus one vote has resulted in two democratic senators of poor quality. Runoff elections have poor turnout that produce poorer results than general elections.
Just sign the petition and get it back on the ballot! Alaska’s voters overwhelmingly hate it. But the language needs to be very straightforward: do you want to repeal RCV, and return the election law to the language that existed before Ballot Measure 1? Yes or no?
That’s the reason the first petition failed. Poorly worded language confused too many folks.
“extremest candidates” ?
Like Nixon, Reagan, Dad Bush, W and Trump?
I worked as a poll chairman for 8 election cycles here in ANC
RCV confuses some people, not all, not most, but some.
The # of “bad ballots” (mis-voted) that have to be torn up tripled under RCV.
How many “bad ballots” are cast?
Do you know that # Marc?
Those are just the people that knew they voted wrong & corrected their ballots
Many “bad ballots” (ballots marked wrong because RCV is more complex) are cast uncorrected and thrown out during the counting process.
As Chair of Repeal Now, the second effort to get rid of RCV, we know at least 50% of voters do not like RCV. To have lost by less than 800 votes after $15,000,000 was spent to save it, that seems to be true. What is difficult opposing it is having the money and volunteers to ensure we have the required signatures to get on ballot, and then the money to fight the lies put out by RCV supporters. If you are one that hates this law, and wants to see it repealed, please become a signature volunteer or donate to our efforts. Our website is: ‘www.repealaknow.com or send an email to: ‘[email protected]. You can also find us on Facebook at: Repeal Now AK. It will take all of us to repeal this awful law. We have a fantastic group of regional directors throughout the state that are working hard every day. Please join us!