An unusual protagonist has emerged in the primary elections for mayor of New York held last Tuesday: the preferential voting system, recently launched in the largest city in the United States.
This method of voting could take weeks to define the candidate for mayor within the Democratic Party.
Partial results with close to 90% of the votes counted as of Wednesday afternoon give the leadership in the Democratic race to Eric Adams, a former police captain who presides over the borough of Brooklyn, with 31.7 out of I support as first choice.
However, due to the new voting system used, it is still possible that the Democratic nomination will go to one of the two candidates who are still behind Adams: the former lawyer of civil rights Maya Wiley (25. 3%) and former Health Commissioner Kathryn Garcia (19.5%).
“This will be about not only the ones, but also the two and three,” said Garcia, alluding to preferential voting or by ranking.
Who wins the Democratic race, he will go as a broad favorite in the New York mayoral election in November against Curtis Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels citizen patrols who won the Republican primary by a wide margin.
But how exactly does this voting system that now faces a special test in the Big Apple work?
“Extremely important”
Preferential voting seeks to prevent voters from choosing a candidate who wins or loses, allowing instead to mark different candidates in order of preference.
If no candidate obtains an absolute majority as the first choice of the voters, the imina of the competition to the one with the least support and their votes are distributed among those who their voters marked as second option.
This procedure is repeated in successive rounds until one candidate achieves a majority. For this reason, the method is also called “instant second round.”
In the system that New York implemented by popular mandate, Democratic voters were able to select up to five candidates on Tuesday to mayor between 13 applicants and sort them in descending order of preference.
Republicans, on the other hand, had only two candidates in the race, which allowed the winner to be defined immediately.
As none of the Democratic candidates obtained an absolute majority of the votes, the tabulation by rounds will continue and The process to select the winner will take several days or weeks.
Although this system has already been used in other US cities such as San Francisco, and some states such as Maine and Alaska have adopted it for federal elections , its implementation in New York is seen as an important step by experts.
“New York City is huge and I think it is the first time that many Americans are seeing how this system works voting, ”says Lee Drutman, a political scientist who authored a book advocating for electoral reform across the United States.
In your opinion, This electoral mechanism can contribute to political restraint instead of the polarization that has frayed the US in recent years, like some countries in Latin America.
“In general terms, I think that “If we used order of preference voting across the US we would see a different kind of politics, more centripetal and less towards the extremes, more coalition building and compromise would be encouraged, and less division and negative campaigning” , says Drutman to BBC Mundo.
And he maintains that, if such a system had been used in the primaries of the Republican Party in 0001304, “Donald Trump would never have won the nomination” that allowed him to be elected president of USA because the majority of the voters of his party opposed him.
Doubts and criticisms
Sure that doubts and criticisms of the preferential voting system have also arisen.
Adams himself, who leads the counting of Democratic votes in New York, had warned that the system could limit the vote of members of low-income black and Latino communities lacking the necessary information on the new way of living otar.
These doubts appeared just when Republicans have promoted projects to restrict the vote in other US states after losing the presidential elections in November, generating concern in the President’s Democratic Party Joe Biden.
But early data from Tuesday’s vote in New York suggests that there was a strong turnout of Democratic voters compared to previous primaries in the party, even for the presidential elections of 2020.
Initial results also indicate that Adams, who is African American, garnered strong support from black and Latino voters.
The system “It seems to have worked well initially here in the city of New York, but we won’t be able to fully evaluate the process until after the vote count is complete, ”says Richard Pildes, professor of constitutional law at New York University (NYU).
Some consider it unlikely that the preferential vote will expand nationally across the US, but others argue that it is possible: it is enough that more states adopt it individually.
” There is a movement in this direction in both Republican and Democratic areas of the country, and it could certainly be used for national elections, ”Pildes tells BBC Mundo.
In fact, different types of preferential voting are They are used at the national level in countries such as Ireland or Australia, as well as in the Dominican Republic or Peru to make up their congresses.
Opponents of the system also argue that it may make elections less predictable, while its defenders argue that it contributed to political moderation in the Australian and Irish case.
“I don’t think there is a single magic formula that will end or drastically reduce polarization in the US,” warns Pildes, “but certainly voting in order of preference can help ”.
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