New York City’s ranked-choice primary

With the hotly-contested ranked choice primary in NYC on Tuesday, voters in NYC (and well beyond) are getting a lot of publicity about how ranked-choice voting works.

The New Republic offers praise for what it calls the “generally friendly, policy-focused” campaign style that the primary has engendered.

Elsewhere, Stephen Pettigrew and Dylan Radley have a column out today about errors marking the ballot, following up on their paper here.  Surveying ballots from a bunch of different jurisdiction, the paper finds that 4.8% attempts to vote for an RCV office contain an improper mark, that 90% of votes with an improper mark are nevertheless ultimately counted in the final tabulation, and that the average rejection rate in ranked choice races – while small – is still considerably higher than the rate in races without ranked choice. 

Both the style of campaigning and the rate of errors in marking the ballot are factors – two among many – in assessing the desirability of a system.  I’ll be interested to see if the error rate in particular is at all different in the NYC primary after the considerable wave of publicity.

Share this: