Democracy Reforms Go Better Together

New York City’s June 22 primary elections drew attention for the many-candidate horserace and particularly for its new electoral system, ranked-choice voting, or RCV. Combined with other electoral innovations, New York has become a laboratory of democratic experimentation.

New York’s first test of ranked-choice voting was marred by a quickly corrected tabulation error by the city’s notoriously incompetent Board of Election. But otherwise, RCV seems to have worked well in the most populous US jurisdiction that’s yet to try it. Almost a million voters participated, the highest turnout in a New York mayoral primary since 1989. The election was surely competitive, with three candidates — Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia and Maya Wiley — holding on for several weeks with a chance to win by reaching 50% as absentee ballots and second-, third-, and eventually fifth-choice votes were counted. A fourth candidate, Andrew Yang, had been a viable contender until a series of miscues late in the campaign. Two of the three viable candidates were women and two were Black — Adams and Wiley — in a city that’s never been governed by a woman and has had only one Black mayor. And the winner, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, had the support, even if he was not the first choice, of a majority in the final round. (Current mayor Bill DeBlasio won his first primary in 2013, avoiding a later runoff, with about 41% of the vote.)

Contests for city council also brought new faces to New York politics. While not all races are decided at this writing, a majority of the Council’s 51 members will be women, many are activists from working-class backgrounds, several foreign-born, and only 20 winners were incumbents.

High participation, vigorous competition, improved candidate diversity, and an outcome satisfactory to a majority is about all we can hope for in an election, whether or not the final result matches our preferences.

But there was more than ranked-choice at play in New York’s lively 2021 vote. Three reforms, from different eras, layered on one another to shape the decision about the city’s likely next mayor. After all, while many aspects of New York’s election procedures are backwards and foreclose participation (ballot access, for example, has always been daunting, on purpose), in other ways, the city has a long record of testing useful reforms.

The most recent major change before RCV was the city’s innovative public matching system for small contributions. Launched at the end of the 1980s, after a cascade of scandals, it has been steadily updated and expanded, most recently by lowering the contribution limit and raising the matching rate to 8:1 — that is each dollar up to the first $250, for a citywide race, can be matched with eight dollars in public funds. Almost all citywide and city council candidates participate in the system, agreeing to contribution and spending limits in return for public matching funds.

Early in this cycle, there was reason to worry that the small-donor matching system might be overwhelmed by independent spending on behalf of candidates. But while there was a jump in outside spending compared to the last competitive election, as Politico noted, “some of the highest-dollar splurges went toward candidates who never got out of the single digits,” including financier Ray McGuire and former Obama official Shawn Donovan.

While the eventual winner, Adams, benefited from private spending as well as a late surge of independent expenditures, Wiley and Garcia, who had not held elected office before, were boosted into a competitive position largely by small donors and the matching program. Each received about three times as much public money as private, and the vast majority of their donors, and also Yang’s, gave $175 or less.

Political science research on money in politics has long supported the proposition that campaign spending matters, but has diminishing returns at higher levels. That is, it’s more important to have enough money to be heard and compete than to have more money than an opponent. Public financing ensured that first-time candidates without strong connections to the city’s traditional financial interests, such as real estate, had enough, and that it came from the kind of middle-class donors who can give a few hundred dollars but not thousands.

How does the small-donor matching system interact with ranked-choice voting? While more data is needed, including the final reports on campaign spending and on City Council races, a good hypothesis is that while the matching system gave several candidates enough to get their message out and begin to compete for votes, ranked-choice voting then made them relevant, quickly. Even if Garcia and Wiley never led in the polls, they were in a position to compete for second choice votes, and other candidates campaigned to get the second choices of Garcia and Wiley voters. (Garcia and Yang even entered into a loose pact to swap second choices.) They couldn’t be ignored. And as voters continued to hear their names, their distinct attributes — Garcia’s reputation for managerial competence, Wiley’s progressive aspirations — continued to draw support, as either first or later choices, from those with longer electoral resumes or more money.

A third feature of New York’s electoral system played a smaller but not irrelevant role: fusion. New York is one of six states that allows parties to cross-endorse candidates from another party, and the only one where it’s long been embedded in the culture of politics. Fusion allows parties to thrive in the interstices between the major parties, often giving their ballot line to the candidates of one of the other parties, but sometimes not. In the past, the Liberal and Conservative Parties thrived under fusion: John V. Lindsay won reelection as mayor in 1969 on the Liberal Party line alone . But more recently, New York’s Working Families Party, a coalition of labor and community organizations, has used the system to thrive.

The Working Families Party rarely denies its ballot line to the Democratic candidate, but the possibility makes its endorsement uniquely valuable in a Democratic primary. (In one notable exception, New York’s current Attorney General, Letitia James, won her first race for City Council in 2003 on the WFP line.) This year, the WFP at first backed three candidates — an option that makes sense in a ranked-choice system — but ultimately put all its energy behind Wiley, boosting her into a close third.

Fusion is not really a “reform,” since it was a common practice in the US until the late 1900s, when many states banned it in order to block an alliance between Democrats and the Populist Party, and it rarely gets much attention as a reform idea. But a true multi-party democracy should make room for parties that can both run their own candidates and influence the major parties through the power of cross-endorsement.

Ultimately, New York City’s elections are not just a win for ranked-choice voting, but illustrate that no single reform can ensure vigorous competition, high participation and diverse voices, but tested political innovations can compound and strengthen one another to achieve those goals.