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Tom Monto

New York City mayor to be elected through Alternative Voting, Democratic primary held June 2021

Updated: Jun 24, 2021

New York City has adopted IRV, what I and others of the old days called Alternative Voting.


It is stated by some that AV allows voters to select their favorite candidate and to indicate their preferences among the other candidates. "That combination can allow the most broadly popular candidate to win the election, while also making clear the full spectrum of voters’ views."


Most importantly of all, STV guarantees the election of someone who is the choice of a majority of the voters. (In rare cases when it cannot do that, it guarantees that the successful candidate will be the one with the most votes when the field of candidates narrows down to two. This ensures a much higher percentage of success than we see under FPTP where 30 percent of the votes is enough to be elected (as was the case in Calgary-McCall in 2015).


IRV prevents vote spitting.

IRV's marked preferences do provide interesting info on voters' sentiments, providing deeper info than FPTP vote does.


It is sometimes said "Ranked choice is also known as instant-runoff voting, because people vote only once. The various “rounds” of voting all occur during the counting of ballots."


But truer to say, that its name is derived from how IRV operates - through successive rounds of vote counting, which work the same as runoff elections such as for members of a political party candidate nomination.


Under IRV the successive rounds are based on the votes cast in just one vote. This means less interruption of a party convention and avoiding the expense of holding multiple polling of the public/voters.


However under NY law, voters can mark their preferences for only up to five candidates and with more than candidates running, it is likely that many votes will be eligible for transfer more than four times, thus be unable to be used. Many votes will thus be declared exhausted, with the voter that cast them finding the vote wasted, his or her voice unheard. A ceiling of five preferences is more than the preferences allowed in the city election of London, Ontario, in 2018, the only recent election in Canada to use AV. But five preferences is not enough when there are 20 candidates in the running. Some votes will not need to be transferred at all, and none at all will need to be transferred if a candidate takes a majority of the votes in the First Count. But likely in many AV elections that will be held in NY City from here on, a ceiling of five preferences will cause waste of votes and uncertainty in the fairness of election results.


IRV works fairly for election of a single person, such as a mayor or a candidate. but does not produce proportionality, so many democrats do not endorse it for election of city councillors.


STV, which uses the same ranked ballots used in IRV, to elect multiple members (multi-member wards), produces proportional representation and is easy to adopt. It was used in 150 city elections in Canada's history.


And in none of these were voters prevented from marking as many preferences as they wanted as is done now under AV in London (ON) and in NY City.


In Australia AV elections, voters are required to rank every candidate (or select a party slate). This is almost the total opposite of these elections where voters are prevented from indicating their full preferences. With every candidate ranked on every ballot, there cannot be any exhausted ballots. And thus there is much fewer wasted votes that way. In some election contests, votes cast for the final eliminated candidate will not be used effectively to elect anyone but that will be a relative few.


Thanks for reading.

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