In the News
June 2, 2021
This Politico article by Katelyn Fossett cites RepresentWomen's 2020 RCV report and features RepresentWomen's Cynthia Richie Terrell. Read an excerpt below.
At the end of last week, the New York City Democratic mayoral primary seemed set; it looked like Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams would be the winner. But something strange happened this week. When the ranked-choice ballots were counted (after the city remedied a weird flop in which it accidentally counted 135,000 “test ballots”), the results showed Adams’ lead was much narrower than predicted: With more than 124,000 absentee ballots left to be counted, he’s only beating former NYC Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia by fewer than 16,000 votes.
For some observers getting their first taste of what ranked-choice elections look like, the flawed counting in New York this week might not have made the best impression. But to others, there is a success story here. After months of lamentations that New York City would never be ready for a woman mayor, it’s ranked-choice voting that has brought a woman so close to the top political office in the city.
Some advocates of ranked-choice voting say that’s not a coincidence. There is evidence to suggest that ranked-choice elections are easier for nontraditional candidates, including women and people of color, to win. According to one report by RepresentWomen, an organization that advocates for election reforms to achieve gender parity in politics: “Over the last decade, 19 cities and counties used ranked choice voting to select local-level officials. … Overall, women won 48% of the individual seats up for election.”
“That’s about 20 points higher than the norm in our cities,” Cynthia Richie Terrell, author of the report, told me.
Why does ranked-choice voting help women? Terrell pointed to a few reasons. She said women, and particularly newcomers, are more comfortable asking voters to make them their second or third choice, which could end up winning them a seat under the ranked-choice voting system. Terrell also said that, in traditional winner-take-all elections, gatekeepers sometimes discourage women and people of color from entering a race in which there is already a woman or candidate of color running, citing a fear that it would split the “women’s vote” or “Black vote” and hurt the women and Black candidates already running. Ranked-choice systems, she says, seem to avoid that issue and encourage a larger, more diverse field.
Read the complete article here.
