New York City’s mayoral race uses a unique system called ranked choice voting, which fundamentally alters how winners are determined. Unlike traditional elections where voters select a single candidate, New York voters can rank up to five candidates in order of preference on their ballot.
If no candidate receives more than 50% of the first-choice votes, a computerized elimination process begins. The candidate with the fewest first-place votes is eliminated, and those votes are redistributed to each voter’s next-ranked choice. This process continues through multiple rounds—potentially factoring in third, fourth, and even fifth choice, until only two candidates remain. The final winner is the one with majority support among the remaining ballots, though that may not be the candidate most voters originally preferred.
In the June 2025 Democratic primary, the ranked choice system significantly altered the initial results. Zohran Mamdani led on election night with 43.5% of first-choice votes, but after several rounds of eliminations and redistributions, he was declared the winner with 56%, while Andrew Cuomo finished with 44%.
This system creates a far more unpredictable election environment. Candidates who appear to hold solid leads on election night can end up losing, or winning, once all voter preferences are fully counted and redistributed.
Ranked choice voting can appear unfair because a candidate with fewer first-choice votes may ultimately win the election. A key technical flaw is “ballot exhaustion,” which happens when voters rank too few candidates to remain in the final rounds. If all of a voter’s selected candidates are eliminated before the last round, their ballot is no longer counted in the final outcome.
A 2015 study of 600,000 votes cast in four local elections in Washington State and California found that winners in all four elections received less than a majority of total votes cast. Studies have found exhaustion rates ranging from 9.6 percent to over 27 percent in some elections, meaning the winner may only represent a majority of remaining votes, not all votes cast.
The increased complexity of ranked choice voting is another major issue. It’s absurd that Democrats, who argue voter ID is too confusing for many people, somehow believe voters can understand and navigate ranked choice voting, and remember to rank enough candidates just to avoid having their ballot disqualified early in the process.
Hellbound and Down 