Take, for instance, the open City Council district in Queens' 26th District. There are 15 contenders for the Democratic nomination in the 26th, all of whom have similar, though not identical, politics.
Looking at just the first-round results, in a first-past-the-post system, Julie Won, the winner of the primary, would have done so with just 18.5% of the vote, less than a percentage point above her nearest rival, Amit S. Bagga. Just over 3,300 people would have selected the winner of a district representing more than 161,000 people.
Thanks to the ranked-choice system, after a dozen rounds of reallocating votes, Won remains the victor but can now claim the seat with a decisive 56% of the vote, beating Bagga by over 13 percentage points. A complicated, complex field simplified with a single trip to the ballot box.
The rollout of ranked-choice voting may have been a hassle and unnecessarily stressful in the counting process, but everywhere else it found a winner in precisely the way voters said they wanted it to back when they passed it in 2019.
Read full article here: https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-city-tried-ranked-choice-voting-here-is-what-we-learned-2021-7
