Melissa Harris-Perry: You're listening to the Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. One week ago, this was me here, on the Takeaway, talking with WNYC's own Brian Lehrer. Brian, let's talk about ranked-choice voting. This is part of the reason that we don't know yet who's won this primary?

Brian Lehrer: Correct. They're saying, probably the week of July 12th

Melissa: [laughs] July 12th. Look how young and naïve we were last week. The New York City Board of Elections is now suggesting that the week of July 30th is more realistic. Because the board has had some, let's call it, computational challenges, with ranked-choice voting, the system being used in the city for the first time in decades. Now, if you are not a New Yorker and have not been bombarded with a year of PSAs, take a listen to this little explainer from FairVote about what ranked-choice voting is.

Female Speaker 2: Ranked-choice voting is another voting method, which allows voters to rank their candidates in order of preference.

Melissa: Now, according to FairVote, at least 20 jurisdictions including Maine and Alaska, now use ranked-choice voting. New York City is the largest jurisdiction to use it. The biggest, yes, but maybe not the most proficient, at least not yet. For more on all of this, we're joined by Christina Greer, associate professor of political science at Fordham University, co-host of the podcast FAQ NYC, and author of the book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration and the Pursuit of the American Dream. Chrissy, it is so great to have you here.

Christina Greer: Thank you so much for having me.

Melissa: Let's just start with a couple of basics. You heard the beginning there of a ranked-choice explanation. Again, for folks who haven't been living in New York and bombarded by the PSAs, tell us a little bit more about it.

Christina: We as voters decided that we would implement ranked-choice voting in our municipal elections because in other cities, say, Minneapolis and San Francisco it's supposed to help the non-traditional candidates become competitive. It's helped women and candidates of color, female candidates of color actually have a chance at the ballot. This allows you to say, "Well, I like Melissa, and I also like Chrissy. I also like this person and that person." You can rank up to five individuals, depending on how many you like. Now, it gets a little tricky because some people went to the ballot and only voted for one person.

Some people voted for three, and some people voted for all five. We also had 13 official candidates on the ballot and a write-in option, so it was quite a bit. We also did not talk about ranked-choice voting that much in 2020, because the Board of Elections was afraid that it would confuse voters since we did not use rank choice voting in our presidential election in November of 2020. The educational piece-- we know many voters only pay attention, say, the month before the election, and much of that information was written, if you went to the polls.

But we also know that there's a fair percentage of New Yorkers who don't read in the language they speak. There was a question as to whether or not people would fully understand this new system, which is quite different from the way people been voting their entire lives.

Melissa: [unintelligible 00:03:07] people went to the polls, they made a choice or three, or four, or five choices. What's happening now isn't so much it seems about voter error, but about board of elections error. What's going on there?

Christina: Yes. New Yorkers, by and large, those who bother to show up-- and we have a pretty embarrassing level of turnout among the voting-eligible population, even though it's better than, say, 2013 numbers, we still barely reach a quarter of voting-eligible New Yorkers who participate. The voter error wasn't there. However, the Board of Elections, which most New Yorkers will tell you needs a fundamental restructuring, they ran a practice test with roughly about 130. We call them dummy voters, fake voters, that they sort of run in a stipulation to make sure that the system is working. When they put in the calculations from June 22nd, they forgot to take out that 130 dummy voters.

When they presented some of the new tabulations, which were still preliminary-- even what they're telling us is still preliminary, because we still have yet to count, almost 125,000 absentee ballots. Many candidates notice discrepancies about the numbers of people in the voting pool. They raised an alarm, the Board of Elections said, "We made a human error, which is we forgot to take out these 130,000 fake voters." Obviously, I don't think that there's malicious corruption intended. However, we know a mistake like that erodes confidence among voters, especially if their candidate is not winning.

Melissa: Hearing something like there were 135,000 fake voters-- sort of like while you're paying the bills and trying to get out the door in the morning, and all that kind of thing-- can so undermine trust in institutions at a time that we desperately need to be rebuilding trust.

Christina: Absolutely. We had four years of a president who stoked those flames. We have to remember that incompetence is not fraud necessarily. What I think we're looking at right now is just sheer incompetence. What further complicates this narrative is that because of our absentee ballots, those individuals who decided to mail in a ballot, were allowed to have their ballot postmarked by June 22nd. We were waiting a full week for all of those to roll in. We still didn't know a full universe of who voted on election night. Every result we've had thus far is incredibly preliminary, because they're adding in the voters who voted early, such as myself.

That's a relatively new phenomenon in New York, allowing voters to vote up to 10 days before the election. We're adding in those who decided to vote on June 22nd, which was election day, and also now we're adding in that third group of people who have absentee and affidavit ballots that were allowed to come in on June 29th.

Melissa: I want to go back to our graduate school days for a minute here, Chrissy, and say, "Were you handing out the early, bivariate tables to your advisors?" I don't know about this releasing of early results. Why not just wait until there's an answer?

Christina: Exactly. You were spot on, Melissa. Why would you slow drip the results, because we know they will change? Or they might change, we don't necessarily know that they'll change. I think that system further erodes confidence. Why don't we just wait until we have everything together? I think the rationale behind the Board of Elections is such that so many New Yorkers are accustomed to getting pretty good results on election night. We knew that because of absentee ballots coming in up until June 29th, we would not have an answer for voters on election night, by and large, [unintelligible 00:06:50] a 99% chance that we wouldn't know.

It's more important to get it right than to get it fast. There's been a lack of communication. Sadly, the Board of Elections has taken to Twitter communication with voters, and there's several hours where they just don't communicate what's going on. Again, this slow drip of preliminary results confuses many people. Then you add in what I think could just be an honest mistake of human error, but it is further eroding confidence as time goes by, and many New Yorkers are not used to waiting a month, possibly more before they know who the next mayor of New York City will be.

Melissa: Accuracy is more important than speed, and stay off of the Twitter machine. Advice from Christina Greer, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University and co-host of the podcast FAQ NYC. Christina, as always, lovely to talk with you.

Christina: As always, Melissa, great job.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.