The capriciousness of ranked choice voting is revealed in NYC

Kathryn Garcia and Eric Adams.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

Voting in New York City's Democratic primary for mayor finished a week ago, but the election nonetheless just took a dramatic turn. Allocation of second-choice votes — a key feature of the ranked-choice voting system that New York is using for the first time — has propelled former sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia from a distant third place all the way to a close second, only two points behind the leader, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams. With approximately 125,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted — more than eight times the margin between Adams and Garcia — a stunning upset is still possible.

Possible — but how likely? As of Sunday, 55,000 of those ballots came from districts that Adams won — a far higher share than went to any other candidate, and a good augury for the current leader. But those absentee ballots will go through the same process of ranked-choice allocation as Election Day ballots — and the Election Day ballots for Andrew Yang and especially Maya Wiley went disproportionately to Garcia (she won 29 percent of the Yang ballots versus 25 percent that went to Adams and 10 percent to Wiley, and 50 percent of the Wiley ballots versus 19 percent that went to Adams). Districts that Garcia won have returned only 39,000 absentee ballots, but the additional 17,000 absentees from Wiley districts and the 12,000 from Yang ones could be enough to push her over the top.

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Noah Millman

Noah Millman is a screenwriter and filmmaker, a political columnist and a critic. From 2012 through 2017 he was a senior editor and featured blogger at The American Conservative. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Politico, USA Today, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, Foreign Policy, Modern Age, First Things, and the Jewish Review of Books, among other publications. Noah lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.