Mamdani won, but ranked-choice voting lost

For many, New York City’s recent mayoral primary was a sign of a healthy democracy — New Yorkers showing up, organizing and making their voices heard.

It was also seen by many as a validation of ranked-choice voting. With Zohran Mamdani’s historic win, there’s renewed enthusiasm for ranked choice as a way to elevate consensus candidates, open the door to new political voices and avoid polarizing outcomes.

But that is not quite what happened.

Dig deeper and the picture gets more complicated. The mayoral race didn’t elevate a broadly supported candidate. Instead, it turned into a binary contest between two deeply polarizing figures — Mamdani, a democratic socialist and vocal critic of the Democratic establishment, and Andrew Cuomo, a scandal-plagued former governor who resigned from office just a few years ago.

Ranked-choice voting is often pitched as a system that lifts up candidates acceptable to the broadest number of people — not necessarily anyone’s first choice, but the one most voters can get behind. In theory, it helps avoid scenarios where deeply unpopular or fringe candidates win because the majority splits its vote.

In practice? The Mamdani-Cuomo face-off shows us something very different.

You couldn’t find two candidates further apart within a political party than Mamdani and Cuomo. Neither really fits the mold of a consensus candidate in a typical Democratic primary, and yet they were the two leading contenders.

The race turned into a straightforward binary: Are you for Mamdani or Cuomo? The ranked ballots became secondary to the first-choice battle between two deeply polarizing figures.

Ranked-choice voting didn’t mitigate polarization. It only masked it. Voters may have technically ranked more than one candidate, but the outcome, and the entire narrative of the race, boiled down to who was ranked first. There is little evidence to suggest that large numbers of voters were thoughtfully ranking across ideological lines. If anything, the illusory promise of cross-ranked camaraderie kept nonviable candidates in the race and prevented consolidation of money, staff and messaging behind alternative candidates to the big two. 

And we shouldn’t forget the real-world challenges of ranked-choice voting implementation, particularly in New York City. Studies showed that in the 2021 mayoral election, ballot errors and incomplete rankings were significantly more common in communities of color. A Politico analysis found that low-income neighborhoods had higher rates of invalid ballots and lower rates of full ballot usage. That’s not just a paperwork problem. It’s a representation problem. If a voting system makes it harder for certain communities to fully make their voices heard, we should be asking hard questions.

None of this is to say ranked-choice voting can’t ever be useful. In some places, under certain conditions, it absolutely can help break through toxic partisanship and offer voters more voice and choice. But it’s not a plug-and-play solution for every jurisdiction, and it certainly didn’t deliver a clean, consensus-building outcome in New York City. Instead, it fueled a head-to-head showdown between two candidates.

We should not treat ranked-choice voting like a one-size-fits-all fix for what ails American elections. States and cities considering this system should move very carefully and demand a strategic case-by-case plan that considers the impact of the change in their political geography.

Real democracy reform isn’t just about changing how votes are counted. It’s about whether more communities are truly being heard. That requires tailoring systems to fit local contexts, investing in voter education and implementation, and measuring success by inclusion and trust. Let’s not mistake innovation for progress or let trendy electoral reforms make us lose sight of the end goal: true representation and a strong democracy.

Sam Oliker-Friedland is executive director of the Institute for Responsive Government.