This is The Sprint for City Hall, a limited-run series on the critical Democratic primary race for mayor.
Ranked-choice voting should be as simple as ordering a barbecue platter. Yet many New Yorkers remain befuddled about how it works. We’re going to demystify it for you.
I’m Dean Chang, and I oversee The New York Times’s coverage of the New York City mayoral race. In today’s newsletter, we take a close look at how ranked-choice balloting worked in the last mayoral primary, explain why some candidates are teaming up against former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and see how one subway aficionado plans to rank his choices. But first, the news.
The News
The ad that cost Andrew Cuomo $622,000
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Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo lost out on more than $600,000 in public matching funds on Monday, after the New York City Campaign Finance Board concluded that his campaign probably illicitly coordinated with a super PAC.
The penalty is the largest leveled against any mayoral campaign to date, though Cuomo may be better positioned to weather it than his rivals. The super PAC supporting him, Fix the City, has already raised $8 million. And he has continued to vacuum up endorsements as he leads in the polls.
But with six weeks left in the race, the latest dust-up highlights a recurring problem for the front-runner. As Cuomo stakes his reputation on competency, his campaign has been marred by a surprising number of amateurish missteps.
He recently released a major housing plan without realizing it contained chunks of incoherent text and work from ChatGPT. Last month, the city delayed paying him millions of dollars in public matching funds after he failed to follow basic rules for how to report donations. (Much of that money was released on Monday.)
All of it has given his opponents at least an opening to renew two longstanding criticisms of Cuomo: that his leadership style is much messier than advertised, and that he has a penchant for pushing the boundaries.
In this case, the Campaign Finance Board said Cuomo appeared to disregard clear rules prohibiting coordination between campaigns and super PACs.
Cuomo posted detailed instructions for how to help his campaign on his website, a practice known as red boxing. A few days later, Fix the City spent $622,056 to run a 30-second TV ad that mirrored some of Cuomo’s requests.
The Campaign Finance Board concluded there was “reason to believe” that the television commercial was “not independent of the Cuomo campaign.”
Both the Cuomo campaign and super PAC insist that the two were not connected, and the campaign plans to appeal.
More news:
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Cuomo won a coveted endorsement over the weekend from Representative Adriano Espaillat, a power broker in the Latino community. Espaillat backed Mayor Eric Adams in 2021. He leads a powerful group of elected officials known as the Squadriano, which dominates politics in northern Manhattan and the Bronx.
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Fix the City reported on Monday its largest contribution ever: $1 million from DoorDash, which has been lobbying City Hall to let food-delivery services charge higher fees. The donation was first reported by Politico.
CHaRtING THE RACE
Votes exhausted
Every vote counts, right? In the Democratic mayoral primary four years ago, that was not exactly true.
It was the first time the city used ranked-choice voting in a mayoral primary. More than 140,000 ballots were not counted in the final round. They were deemed “exhausted,” or inactive, because they did not include either of the final two candidates: Eric Adams, who ultimately won, or Kathryn Garcia, as you can see in the graphic below.
If roughly 5 percent of those ballots had listed Garcia, she would have beaten Adams.
Let’s try to demystify this a bit.
Voters can choose as many as five candidates, in order of preference. On election night, the first-choice votes are tabulated; if someone gets more than half of those votes, that person is declared the winner. If no one exceeds 50 percent, that’s when the other ranked choices come into play. (Looking for a more detailed explanation? See here.)
We’ve put together a round-by-round walk-through on how ranked-choice voting played out in 2021 — a potential road map for this year’s primary.
Issue of the Week
The ins and outs of ranked-choice voting
Imagine a barbecue joint where every customer gets a metal tray with five compartments of varying size and fills it with any of roughly a dozen choices. At night’s end, the restaurant determines its favored dish based on what was picked. That, in a nutshell, is how ranked-choice voting works.
So who wouldn’t fill up their tray? New York City voters, that’s who. In 2021, one of every eight voters selected only one candidate. Half of those people listed Eric Adams.
Back to the barbecue pit. Many voters walked away with only one thing in their tray. And for those who chose Adams, a sort-of-vegetarian, you didn’t even get brisket.
Choices, even when you decide not to make them, have consequences.
Ranked-choice voting is back this year, and this time around, the candidates — as well as political groups, unions and even some voters — are trying to game out the best strategies to maximize their chances.
Unions and left-leaning organizations are endorsing several candidates, urging their followers to list all of them. Some are actively discouraging voters from ranking Cuomo, the current front-runner. One such group calls itself DREAM, or Don’t Rank Evil Andrew for Mayor.
Maya King, a political reporter who helped cover the 2024 presidential race, has been looking into some of the ranked-choice game theories that voters might use. Here’s what she learned.
Game-theory ballot strategy
If you’re a Cuomo superfan, you should rank him first. Given his front-runner status, it’s likely that your vote will make it to the final round. Ranking only one person, however, can risk that even a dominant candidate like the former governor could be overtaken in latter rounds of voting. To maximize your ballot, use all five opportunities to rank a candidate, even if you’re only there for just one.
If there’s a candidate you definitely do not want to win, you should exclude that person from your ballot — exactly the mission of the DREAM initiative. Using all five of your slots increases the chances of your ballot living to the final round.
If Zohran Mamdani is your man, he should get your top ranking. Mamdani backs DREAM, so if you want to follow his lead, don’t rank Cuomo. And Mamdani has promised to cross-endorse at least one of his opponents in the coming weeks, so that will offer guidance for his fans on who to rank after him.
If you’re gunning for a long-shot candidate, reserve your top slots for the ones you like most and consider the candidates they cross-endorse for your latter choices.
In the 2021 primary, Andrew Yang made a late-stage endorsement of Garcia as his No. 2, a move that helped her jump into second place over Maya Wiley, falling only 7,197 votes short of Adams. Could more deal-making be on the way this year? Emma Fitzsimmons has the latest.
Teamwork makes the dream work
With Cuomo steadily leading in the polls, it seems likely that trailing candidates will join forces in the weeks ahead in the hopes of deterring people from voting for him.
Jumaane Williams, the city’s public advocate and a fierce critic of Cuomo, said he discussed the idea with two candidates he’s planning to endorse: Brad Lander and Adrienne Adams.
“It’s one of the things I’m bringing up — the need to be willing to cross-endorse other candidates and to fully utilize ranked-choice voting,” he said.
Some progressive Democrats believe the best strategy is to consolidate around one candidate. Williams disagrees. Cross-endorsements allow the voting bases of different candidates to boost one another, he said, and voters can pick their first choice while also ranking “someone else who I can accept.”
The left-leaning Working Families Party endorsed four candidates — Lander, Adrienne Adams, Mamdani and Zellnor Myrie — at an event where all four linked arms.
Lander’s campaign said in a statement that he would “act strategically and consider cross-endorsements to both help Brad win — and ensure Andrew Cuomo will never be the next mayor of New York City.”
But there has also been some tension behind-the-scenes as the candidates scramble to emerge as the strongest alternative to Cuomo. Mamdani and Lander both met recently with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as they vie for her endorsement, and there was disagreement over how they might work together on anti-Cuomo ads.
What’s Your Ranked-Choice Ballot Look Like?
Benjamin Kabak, subway aficionado
Benjamin Kabak, who has more than 40,000 followers as the person behind Second Avenue Sagas, has become a prominent evangelist for New York City’s subway.
Kabak has rallied support for congestion pricing and assailed Cuomo’s management of the transit system as governor. He plans to leave Cuomo off his ballot and to rank five other Democrats to stop him.
His first choice: Lander, the city comptroller, who recently released a 29-page transportation plan that includes a pledge to make sure that a train arrives every six minutes, including during nights and weekends.
Overall, Kabak said he prioritized two factors: “competent, progressive governance” and who can beat Cuomo: “We do not need another corrupt mayor who has not lived in the city and does not have a feel for the success of a vibrant urban city.”
Kabak listed Adams, the City Council speaker who has won some major endorsements, fifth on his ballot to maximize the odds of his ballot surviving to the final round under ranked-choice voting.
“She has institutional support to top Cuomo,” he said.
Photo of the week
Adrienne Adams hits the Haitian parade
Parades are a mayoral race rite of passage, and last weekend’s Haitian Culture Day Parade in Brooklyn was no exception. Mayor Adams was there, wearing a blue ball cap with the word “love” on its front. Among other Democratic notables were Lander, Myrie and Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund executive who is running as a pro-business candidate.
But few seemed to embrace the festivities as much as Adrienne Adams, who served as grand marshal. Adams, who is not related to the mayor, has trailed Cuomo in polls and is trying to compete with him to win over Black voters, who are a critical part of his voting base.
Adams has visited Black churches, where she is known to join the choir to belt gospel music. Brooklyn has a major Haitian population, and the area where the parade took place is known as “Little Haiti.”
DATES TO WATCH
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June 4: The first Democratic primary debate. (7 p.m., WNBC-TV.)
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June 12: The second debate, restricted to leading contenders. (7 p.m., NY1.)
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June 14-22: Early voting.
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June 24: Primary Day. Polls are open 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.
The post The Ballot Basics of Ranked-Choice Voting appeared first on New York Times.
