New York City leaders sue to postpone ranked-choice voting system
The lawsuit claims the election board hasn't properly educated voters about it.
New York City is slated to become the largest city in the nation to use a ranked-choice voting system. However, a group of city council leaders and other organizations are arguing in court that it's not the right time for such a drastic change.
Six New York City Council members, who are part of the council's Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, and organizations representing a variety of voters from different backgrounds, filed a lawsuit against the city's Board of Elections on Tuesday that seeks to stop it from changing the city's voting system from a traditional plurality method to ranked-choice.
City voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure in 2019 that changes all citywide elections and primaries to the new method where voters are asked to list their candidates in order of preference and the victor is decided through a process of elimination based on those rankings.
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pg slotA special election is scheduled for February to replace a vacant city council seat and would be the first race to use ranked-choice. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit contend the board's current plan to roll out the system is inadequate and hasn't done a good job educating the electorate on how it works, particularly among minority and immigrant communities.
"RCV requires voters to be informed and to be informed on a larger and much more in-depth scale," the plaintiffs wrote.
Under a ranked-choice voting ballot, voters rank their candidates based on their preferences. Voters can also choose only one candidate and leave the other rankings blank, if they wish.
If one candidate gets the majority of the first choice votes, that candidate is declared the winner.
If no one candidate gets a majority, the results will then head into what is known as an instant runoff.
Election officials will look at the ballots and eliminate the candidate who received the fewest number of first-choice rankings. The ballots that listed the eliminated candidate as the top choice are then re-examined for their second choice.
The candidates that were ranked second on those ballots are tallied, and those votes are transferred to the remaining candidates.
If there is a candidate with a majority after the transfer, that person is the winner. If not, the process continues to more rounds until there is a clear majority.
This post was edited by mini ming at December 10, 2020 3:00 AM MST