“Ranked Choice Voting gives a strong voice to all voters in our elections, and ensures candidates with the broadest support get to govern.”
So says a pro-RCV group called Rank the Vote. And the group is absolutely right. Little wonder then that there is a move within the Democratic Party to use the system in the next presidential primary season.
Reporting that story, the news website Axios said that RCV “is a tool that drew national attention when it propelled New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to a decisive primary win.”
That’s true, too, but a little background information might help here. The incumbent Mayor Eric Adams was also elected by RCV in 2021, and that year’s primary illustrated far better than this year’s how the system works and what it can do.
Both Adams and Mandami prevailed in a very crowded field. In the 2021, there were 13 Democrats vying for the party’s nomination, and this year 11. Four years ago, however, the vote was much more fractured and spread out. In 2025, six of the candidates got less than 1 percent of the vote.
In the 2021 primary, Adams led the way with 30.7 percent after the first ballot, Maya Wiley came in second with 21.4 pc, Kathryn Garcia was on 19.6 and Andrew Tang, a former presidential primary contender, got 12.2. Now, looking at those figures one might reasonably assume that Adams had a big advantage going into subsequent ballots. A person with some RCV knowledge, though, would spot that the 2nd- and 3rd-placed candidates were in a potentially strong position. (Both women, incidentally, were reported to be in Mamdani’s camp in 2025.)
In fact, Garcia, a recent commissioner of the Sanitation Department, edged ahead of law professor and civil rights activist Wiley, and was then defeated by Adams 50.4 percent to 49.6 in the final ballot. Adams easily beat Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, by 66.99 to 27.76, in the general election.
So Garcia, a virtual unknown, came incredibly close to being the poster child for RCV by adding 30 percentage points to her vote tally over the course of a few ballots.
Mandami’s 43.8 percent was a strong first-preference performance. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Tories got 43.9 percent of the popular vote when she was first elected head of government in 1979, while President Bill Clinton received 43.0 of the ballots his first time in 1992. Even in the STV proportional representation system, a 43 or 44 percent first-preference vote can be enough to win a majority of seats in parliamentary elections because of vote transfers.
Mandami’s lead of 7 percent over Cuomo was almost doubled by the final ballot — he won by 56.39 percent to 43.61 — so the contention that he was “propelled” to a “decisive” win in the Democratic primary is indeed correct.
