Ranked Choice Voting Could Install An Islamic Extremist In New York City Hall

Ranked choice voting is a seductive idea. It promises moderation, civility, and consensus. But as the 2025 New York City mayoral race illustrates with brutal clarity, its actual function is something closer to electoral alchemy, capable of transforming ideological second-raters into frontrunners through procedural sleight of hand. The system does not amplify the popular will. It distorts it. And in this year’s Democratic primary, that distortion may elevate Zohran Mamdani, a self-declared democratic socialist with a documented record of antisemitism and lawless activism, into the most powerful municipal office in America, not because he earned the most votes, but because he engineered the smartest alliance.

Let us be blunt. Under a traditional voting system, Mamdani’s campaign would be dead on arrival. His record reads like a fever dream of progressive radicalism: anti-Israel agitation, sympathy for and even participation in violent protest, proposals that promise fiscal ruin, and a contemptuous indifference bordering on hate toward the city’s largest Jewish population outside Israel. No rational electorate, surveyed in good faith and counted cleanly, would reward such a man with power. But ranked choice voting has created a loophole, one that Mamdani and his ally, Comptroller Brad Lander, are exploiting through a cross-endorsement strategy designed to bypass the democratic majority. It is a scheme with all the procedural legitimacy of a three-card monte table and the same level of respect for the intelligence of the mark.

Here is how it works. In New York’s ranked choice system, voters select up to five candidates in order of preference. If no one gets over 50 percent of the vote in the first round, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and their votes are redistributed to the next preferences on their ballots. This process continues until a candidate crosses the 50 percent threshold. In practice, it means that a candidate who comes in second, or even third, can win, provided they are strategically ranked by enough voters as a fallback option.

Enter the Mamdani-Lander alliance. Each has urged their supporters to rank the other second. Their hope is not to win on the first round. It is to survive long enough to accumulate second-choice votes as other candidates are eliminated. Former Governor Andrew Cuomo, leading in first-choice support, is the clear frontrunner in a traditional race. But under ranked choice, Mamdani may prevail in later rounds through Lander’s redirected support. Cuomo has not cross-endorsed any rivals, which leaves him vulnerable. Should Mamdani come in second to Cuomo but inherit enough of Lander’s ballots, he could be declared the winner, despite having fewer first-choice votes.

This is not a hypothetical. It is today’s threat. Election Day is here, and the future of the city is being negotiated not in the minds of voters, but in the backroom deals of ideologues. The public may still believe they are choosing a mayor. In truth, they are participating in a kind of probabilistic simulation where preferences are weaponized and clarity dies by a thousand algorithmic cuts.

Now consider the man who may benefit from this procedural deception. Zohran Mamdani is not merely progressive. He is militantly anti-Israel, proudly affiliated with groups that have glorified terrorism, and prone to describing Hamas-inspired chants like “globalize the intifada” as peaceful protest. He has aligned with radicals who describe Jews as “bloodthirsty pig dogs,” and he has not repudiated them. He boycotted resolutions recognizing the Holocaust. He led rallies in front of the Israeli Consulate while demonstrators called for intifada revolutions. And he wants to be mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel.

One need not support Netanyahu to see the danger. Mamdani’s obsession with delegitimizing the Jewish state is not mere foreign policy, it is an animating ideology that overrides his concern for the city he ostensibly serves. His legislative record is a barren desert, save for proposals designed to antagonize Israel and criminalize charitable giving to Jewish causes. And yet, ranked choice voting may hand him the mayoralty.

This is not democracy. This is a procedural parlor trick, and Mamdani is not the only trickster at the table. Ranked choice voting, adopted in New York through a 2019 referendum, has been sold as an improvement on our creaky electoral mechanisms. It is nothing of the kind. In Alaska, it was used to defeat a Republican despite clear conservative plurality. In Maine, it empowered fringe candidates to leapfrog moderates. And in San Francisco, it has left voters baffled and disenfranchised, their ballots exhausted before the final count.

The technical term for this is “ballot exhaustion”, when a voter’s ranked choices are all eliminated before the decisive round, rendering their vote moot. In New York’s 2021 mayoral race, over 140,000 ballots were exhausted. That is 140,000 voices silenced not by apathy, but by design. Ranked choice encourages strategic voting, confuses the less politically sophisticated, and transforms what should be a straightforward civic act into an exercise in procedural gaming. It is anti-democratic in effect, whatever its proponents claim in theory.

Supporters argue that ranked choice reduces negativity. Perhaps it does. But it also reduces clarity. It replaces the simple contest of ideas with a labyrinth of strategies. And when those strategies involve elevating a man like Mamdani, a man who marched with pro-Hamas activists, who views Israel as a criminal enterprise, who proposed city-run grocery stores in a metropolis drowning in red ink, one must ask whether procedural civility is worth the price of ideological catastrophe.

Imagine, for a moment, the aftermath. Mamdani takes office. He freezes rent, hikes taxes, declares war on NYPD funding, and begins a regulatory jihad against landlords, grocers, and anyone earning more than a bodega’s worth of income. He blocks evictions, bankrupts small business, and creates a fiscal death spiral that drives the city’s tax base to Florida. This is not fiction. It is the logical consequence of policies he has publicly championed.

What kind of system would enable this outcome? Not one built on popular will. Not one that honors voter intent. Only ranked choice voting makes it possible. Only ranked choice creates a world in which the second-place candidate becomes mayor by virtue of alliance, not affection, by strategy, not substance.

Elections should be about clarity. Ranked choice is opacity masquerading as nuance. It transforms our civic process into an algorithmic ritual where voters are less citizens than data points to be manipulated. In this year’s election, it may elevate a radical extremist over a centrist former governor. And if that happens, the system, not the voters, will be to blame.

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