How Ranked-Choice Voting Changed the Way New York City Runs Campaigns

By Chloe Rotonda

In recent years, New York City has implemented significant electoral reforms aimed at reshaping how elections function and how voters engage with the political process over time. The push for ranked-choice voting in New York City did not emerge overnight. It built on a decades-long national movement: New York City and dozens of other American cities used ranked-choice voting in the early twentieth century. Following a wave of post-World War II repeal campaigns, some fueled by opposition to the multiracial coalitions the system helped elect, only Cambridge, Massachusetts, was still using it by 1960. The modern revival began decades later, gaining momentum through cities like San Francisco and the Twin Cities in the 2000s, and reaching a turning point in 2016 when Maine became the first state to adopt ranked-choice voting by referendum, later extending it to presidential elections. 

New York City's own path started with a practical grievance. A costly, low-turnout 2009 runoff election for public advocate and comptroller renewed local interest in alternatives to the traditional two-round system, and City Council Member Gale Brewer introduced the city’s first ranked-choice voting legislation the following year. Charter Revision Commissions in both 2010 and 2018 studied the idea, but held off after concluding the city needed more time to deliberate. In 2019, the Charter Revision Commission, spurred on by advocacy from groups like Rank the Vote NYC and Common Cause New York, finally put the question to voters. Voters approved the resulting charter amendment by a landslide, nearly three-quarters in favor, introducing ranked-choice voting (RCV) for primary and special elections and fundamentally altering the structure of local elections by allowing voters to rank multiple candidates rather than just select one. The measure arrived as part of a broader national wave: eleven cities used ranked-choice voting in the November 2019 elections alone, while signature drives were underway that year to bring statewide ballot measures to Massachusetts and Alaska. 

This reform was designed to address several specific problems with the city's prior electoral system. Under the old rules, citywide primaries required a candidate to clear 40% of the vote or face a runoff. Turnout consistently cratered between the primary and the runoff election, adding cost and eroding participation. The plurality system also created two related risks: vote-splitting, where two ideologically similar candidates divide a shared base, allowing a candidate most voters opposed to win, and strategic voting, where people cast a ballot for a "lesser evil" rather than their actual preference out of fear of helping the candidate they like least. Ranked-choice voting was meant to remove both pressures by letting voters rank up to five candidates, so a ballot cast for a longshot or lesser-known contender still counts toward a second or third choice, if that candidate is eliminated, rather than being wasted. The Commission's final report also argued the system would reduce negative campaigning, since candidates now need to court second- and third-choice rankings from their rivals' supporters rather than just mobilizing their own base, and that it would guarantee true majority winners instead of officials elected with a bare plurality. Advocates pointed to research studying California cities that suggested ranked-choice voting tends to increase the number of women and candidates of color who win office compared to traditional plurality systems, though this finding is contested and other studies show smaller or no effect.

The full effects of these reforms remain debated. Some studies suggest that ranked-choice voting can increase voter engagement and participation, with recent New York City elections reaching the highest turnout levels in over a decade. Additionally, research indicates that voters have generally adapted to the system, with a large majority ranking multiple candidates, suggesting meaningful engagement with the new format. At the same time, critics argue that the system may introduce complexity, potentially confusing voters by creating unintended consequences for representation and electoral outcomes. 

It’s worth asking who these turnout gains have actually reached. The clearest patterns run along generational and registration lines rather than racial ones. In the 2025 mayoral primary, turnout among voters ages 18 to 29 nearly doubled from 2021, reaching 35.2%, and newly registered voters turned out at almost double the rate of already registered ones. Manhattan led all boroughs, with turnout over 40%, while Staten Island lagged at just over 16%, though that gap long predates ranked-choice voting. Race is the more contested variable. FairVote’s analysis of the 2025 primary found voters in Assembly districts with larger Hispanic, Black, and Asian American populations were, if anything, more likely to rank multiple candidates than voters in whiter districts. That cuts against an earlier and more prominent claim: after the 2021 primary, Eric Adams’s campaign argued that ranking candidates favored wealthier, more politically engaged voters over working-class and minority voters, who were said to be more likely to leave ballots incomplete. The evidence for that turned out to be thin. A San Francisco study found Black voters were actually more likely than others to complete a full ballot, and political scientists found no link between race and how many candidates someone ranked. The staying power of Adams's claim suggests that outcomes likely depend more on whether campaigns and community organizations actively teach voters how to rank than on the mechanics of the system itself. 

The organizing question is also where the clearest change in candidate behavior shows up. Because a ballot can still count toward a second or third choice, campaigns have started building formal cross-endorsement slates instead of campaigning purely against each other. The starkest example came in the 2025 Democratic mayoral primary, when Zohran Mamdani and Brad Lander, both trailing frontrunner Andrew Cuomo, cross-endorsed each other and campaigned jointly, with Lander explicitly invoking 2021 as a cautionary tale: "Four years ago, we wound up with one of the worst mayors in our history, largely because the two top alternatives in the race did not come together." The Working Families Party built a broader four-candidate slate around the arrangement, and the payoff was measurable. FairVote's tabulation data showed 65% of Mamdani's supporters ranked Lander second, and 61% of Lander's votes transferred to Mamdani once he was eliminated. Cuomo, by contrast, declined to cross-endorse anyone and ranked only himself. The lesson campaigns appear to be drawing is that ranked-choice voting rewards coalition-building between ideologically aligned candidates and punishes the purely oppositional, “go-it-alone” campaigning that plurality elections tend to favor. 

Taken together, the evidence suggests ranked-choice voting has done more to strengthen New York City's elections than to destabilize them, though not in every way its architects promised. The reform has clearly solved the problems it was designed to solve: costly, low-turnout runoffs are gone, winners now claim genuine majority support rather than bare pluralities, and turnout, especially among voters under 30 and newly registered voters, has climbed to levels the city hadn't seen in over a decade. The feared downside, that ranking multiple candidates would disproportionately confuse or exclude working-class and minority voters, has not held up under scrutiny; if anything, voters of color have ranked ballots at rates equal to or higher than white voters in the elections studied so far. Where the reform's effects remain more uncertain is on the campaign side. Ranked-choice voting has visibly changed how candidates behave, rewarding the kind of coalition-building Mamdani and Lander practiced in 2025 and punishing the go-it-alone strategy Cuomo stuck with, but whether that produces better governance or simply savvier campaigns is a separate question this analysis can't answer. And because the system has only been used citywide twice, in 2021 and 2025, both under unusual political conditions, it's still too early to say whether these patterns will hold once ranked-choice voting becomes a normal, unremarkable part of how New Yorkers vote rather than a novelty candidates and voters are still learning to navigate.