The head of the NAACP in New York slammed the new ranked-choice voting system as “voter suppression” while calling for an overhaul of the bumbling New York City Board of Elections.
“Ranked choice voting is not beneficial to minorities. It’s voter suppression,” Hazel Dukes, president of the NYS chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Thursday in a phone interview.
“I hope that the courts see that ranked choice voting is not right for democracy.”
Dukes’ comments come after the board of elections initially botched the preliminary count in the Democratic primary for mayor by erroneously uploading 135,000 test votes.
Borough President Eric Adams led in the initial first place ballot count by ten percentage points on primary night June 22. But Adams’ lead shrunk to just two percentage points over former Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia when the elections agency re-calculated the numbers after discarding the 135,000 fake votes from the day prior. The results were nearly identical.
But another 124,000 absentee ballots have yet to be counted.
Dukes said she remained skeptical about the results because election officials “made a mistake on the first try.”
Adams has filed a pre-emptive lawsuit reserving his right to petition the court to oversee the count.
Dukes said she will put the issue of ranked-choice voting on the NAACP agenda for its August meeting.
Under RCV, New Yorkers for the first time were allowed to select as many as five candidates in the mayoral race and other contests in order of preference in the June 22 primary elections.
The new system represents a huge change in city politics because it means that voters are effectively casting ballots for the first round and any potential runoff at the same time. Under RCV, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their voters’ other choices on the ballot are redistributed to the remaining candidates — until there are two candidates remaining through a process of elimination. A winner is then declared based on the tabulations.
Meanwhile, the civil rights advocate also said it’s time to pass a law to overhaul the operations of the scandal-scarred Board of Elections, whose commissioners are selected by the Democratic and Republican leaders in the city’s five counties.
“We’ve had enough. Something must happen at the Board of Elections concerning its structure and governance,” Dukes said.
“We’ve had hearings. We’ve talked about it. We’re in the 21st century. We are not in a third world country.
Dukes said she’s willing to look at plans devised by election experts to bring “some kind of professionalism” to the agency.
