By Nate Cohn, The New York Times
The competition for the Democratic mayoral nomination in New York City is wide open. It’s the kind of race that ranked-choice voting is meant to help, by letting voters support their top choice without forfeiting the opportunity to weigh in on the most viable candidates.
It’s also the kind of race that might test one of the major risks of ranked-choice voting: a phenomenon known as ballot exhaustion. A ballot is said to be “exhausted” when every candidate ranked by a voter has been eliminated and that ballot thus no longer factors into the election.
With so many viable candidates and most New Yorkers using ranked choice for the first time, all of the ingredients are in place for a large number of exhausted ballots. If the race is close enough, it’s a factor that could even decide the election.