New York is the most diverse city in the world and has made progress on diversifying our elected leadership. Yet we still have too few women in city elected offices and need more non-traditional candidates, including candidates of color.
Today, women make up 51% of the New York City population but hold only 23% of seats in City Council. And when it comes to women of color, the numbers are worse. None of us currently occupy any citywide office, and we’ve never come close to being mayor. But we can change that on election day, by voting yes on Ballot Question 1, which would authorize ranked-choice voting.
Right now, candidates for political office routinely win without a majority of our votes, leaving communities fractured in elections that are often polarizing. Ranked-choice voting — listing, in order of preference, the candidates we want to see in office, elected San Francisco’s first black female mayor, London Breed, even though black people are only 6% of the city’s population. Two candidates of color in Minneapolis were able to work together by asking voters to rank them either first or second, so that one of them — a black trans man named Phillipe Cunningham — ultimately won.
Here’s how ranked-choice voting works. Instead of voting for just one candidate, we can choose to rank our top five candidates in local primary and special elections. So if you want to see more women and people of color in office you can vote for as many of them as appear on the ballot, increasing the chance that any one of them will win. (If you still want to vote for just one candidate, you can just list one.)
A candidate who collects over 50% of the vote wins. If there’s no majority winner, then the last-place candidate is eliminated and his or her supporters’ second-choice candidates get their vote. No one has to come back to the ballot box for a runoff election.
Some have expressed concerns that a yes on 1 will hurt the chances of candidates of color. Not so. In California, people of color increased representation by 9% even in majority-white districts . A 2018 study done by Fair Vote looked at the four Bay Area cities with ranked-choice voting and found that candidates of color won 62% of those races, compared to only 38% before. Women of all races increased representation to 42%, with an increase in women of color victories.
Cities without ranked-choice voting, like New York, have actually seen a drop in women of color winning office.
In New York City, Mayor de Blasio won the 2013 mayoral primary race after winning 41% of the primary vot to Bill Thompson’s 26% and Christine Quinn’s 15%. In exit polling, blacks split about equally between the two candidates, with de Blasio winning more Latinos, but both winning a sizable share.
If we had used ranked-choice voting in this election, we would have had an instant runoff where the lowest-performing candidate was removed from the running, and the votes retabulated based on using the number two rankings. That doesn’t tell us who would have won in 2013. It does tell us that the black male and woman candidate (Thompson and Quinn) would have had another opportunity to win.
Runoff elections often weaken electoral power of low-income and communities of color who have lower voter participation rates and who are less likely to come back for a runoff vote. If only one of us can win, then we all lose. That’s neither fair nor equitable. My whole career has been about fighting for racial justice to put power back in the hands of disenfranchised people.
On Election Day, Nov. 5, we have a chance not only to revolutionize the way we vote, but to change what our politics looks like. That’s why I’m voting yes on Question 1 for ranked-choice voting.
Wiley is the former counsel to Mayor de Blasio and founder of the Center for Social Inclusion.