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New York City's mayoral election has become the race to watch because of its surprisingly competitive nature but also the electoral system that's helped it become so competitive: ranked choice voting.

Adopted in several states and cities across the U.S., ranked choice voting essentially allows voters to express a preference for more than one candidate. In New York City, for example, voters rank their top five choices. If a voter's top choice gets eliminated, their vote goes to the candidate who is next on their ballot.

It's a relatively new change for New York City, which first used it in the 2021 primary, and many other jurisdictions—and a method that aims to address what some see as a fatal flaw in traditional elections: lack of meaningful choice and polarization.

While ranked choice voting has its benefits, political scientists say it also has its fair share of problems, which have become apparent in the race for New York City's mayor.

Ideally, the system "allows people to express more diverse ideological preferences and potentially even elect more ideologically diverse candidates," says Nicholas Beauchamp, an associate professor of political science at Northeastern University.

When there are only two established candidates, especially candidates who might be further apart on the political spectrum, "even putting forth a third candidate can undercut your own side in many ways," Beauchamp explains. Ranked choice voting potentially allows for people who have broader but less extreme levels of support to become viable candidates.

Beauchamp points to New York City mayoral candidates like Brad Lander, who trails frontrunners Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani.

"Say only 10% of the voters vote him first but 60% of the voters vote him second," Beauchamp says. "The end result is that if he won, everybody would be like, "Not so bad." Nobody would be high, nobody would be low."

Ranked choice voting also has the potential to change how candidates campaign, says Costas Panagopoulos, a distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern. Candidates like Mamdani cross-endorsed with other candidates, encouraging voters to rank them and select other candidates higher on their ballot in the hopes of getting support from a larger part of the electorate.

"As we have watched an intensification of targeting voters and microtargeting voters, in part by trying to figure out who is the top candidate they support, and focusing campaigns' energy on those voters, other voters are virtually ignored by those campaigns," Panagopoulos says. "In this case with ranked choice voting … candidates have incentives to appeal to more voters in the electorate."

However, the New York City mayoral race is the perfect test case for what happens when the idealized version of ranked choice voting hits the reality of elections in the U.S., Beauchamp says.

In an ideal scenario, "everybody's well-informed, there's only three candidates, everybody sincerely ranks them and essentially the third-place winner comes out on top because he's the one who makes everyone the least unhappy," Beauchamp says.

The problem is that in a race like the one in New York City, there are nine candidates and "even knowing two candidates well is something that many—perhaps even a majority of—voters" tend not to do, he explains. As a result, the equation that most voters tend to consider between name recognition, ideology, policy and suitability starts to weigh much more in favor of the former.

"The end result is even if voters should prefer someone to the right of someone like Cuomo or to the left of Cuomo, they end up naming Cuomo because they know him," Beauchamp says.

"New York is a great case because it's the realistic example of what happens when you have ranked choice voting," Beauchamp says. "You have a combination of totally uninformed or very uninformed voters who are voting mainly based on name recognition and then a bunch of sophisticated voters who are not sincerely ranking, but are instead playing all sorts of strategic games."

Even with all of the criticisms associated with ranked choice voting, some experts say it is an attempt at solving the issues plaguing the traditional U.S. electoral system.

"It's fair to point out that there is no perfect or optimal electoral system," Panagopoulos says. "Every approach has strengths and weaknesses, and it's a matter of weighing those strengths and weaknesses against each other to adopt a method that is as good as it can be, recognizing it's not flawless."

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News .