THE BOSTON CITY COUNCIL voted 8-4 to implement ranked-choice voting for city elections on Wednesday, tapping on what many consider the first domino in the latest round of ranked-choice voting pushes.
The system asks voters to select their candidates in order of preference. In general terms, candidates with the fewest numbers of first choice votes are eliminated over multiple rounds of vote counting, until a candidate emerges with the largest amount of consensus support. In effect, it selects for the candidate most acceptable to most voters.
“This is about making sure that we are building a better democracy by electing candidates who are able to build a broad majority of support,” City Council President Ruthzee Louijeune said before the vote on Wednesday. Louijeune worked as an election lawyer in Maine during the country’s first ranked-choice voting congressional election in 2018.
Proponents cheer the process as a way to avoid the so-called “spoiler effect” where candidates with less popular support carve off votes from candidates with similar political appeal, leaving the path clear for candidates who may not reflect the interests of most voters but secure the largest vote share in a “winner takes all” election. Spoiler candidates are often discouraged from running and expanding the field, advocates say, for fear that they would harm ideological allies’ chances.
Critics decry ranked-choice voting as too complicated for people to understand, arguing that it undermines the intuitive principle that a person would like to vote for a single favored candidate. If a voter only feels strongly about one candidate, but that candidate gets the fewest number of first choice votes, opponents say the voter’s choice is essentially thrown away after the first round of counts.
The current system is “simple, clear, [and] makes sure every vote counts,” said City Councilor At-Large Erin Murphy at the council meeting, adding that ranked-choice voting could be confusing to voters who do not speak English as a first language.
“Let’s fix our current voting system first,” Councilor Ed Flynn said on Wednesday, referencing issues with the last city election that left polling places in multiple neighborhoods short on ballots and prompted Secretary of State William Galvin to launch an investigation into the Boston Election Department. “Let’s not set up the Boston Election Department for failure,” Flynn said.
Louijeune said the city’s election commissioner clearly stated during multiple meetings that the elections department would be “ready and able” to move forward if ranked-choice voting were implemented.
The Boston proposal would increase the number of candidates moving from the primary stage to the general election, at which point ranked-choice would take effect, rather than ranked-choice voting starting at the preliminary election.
Cambridge is one of the rare US cities to use a proportional ranked-choice voting system, which has been in place since the early 1940s, to elect its local officials. Ranked-choice elections are far from a liberal slam-dunk, as some opponents claim, with moderate candidates like Eric Adams coming out on top of a busy New York City ranked-choice election and Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who has never held elected office, winning the San Francisco mayor’s race in part because of his dominance in second- and third-choice votes.
A bid to bring ranked-choice voting across Massachusetts by ballot measure failed in 2020, by 55 percent to 45 percent. Just five of the state’s 14 counties voted in favor of the measure.
Suffolk County, dominated by the city of Boston, showed up most strongly with just over 60 percent voting in favor of ranked-choice voting. But the statewide loss put a waiting period in place before the subject could be revisited by statewide referendum, because it is unconstitutional for a measure to be put before voters if it is “substantially the same” as another measure submitted in the last two statewide general elections held in even-numbered years.
In the meantime, the coalition behind the ranked-choice ballot measure turned its eyes to the Bay State’s capital city.
When Cheryl Clyburn Crawford, executive director of MassVOTE, described the Boston push in July 2023, she didn’t point to any problems with the city’s nonpartisan runoff election system, which includes an at-large city council system where voters cast ballots for up to four citywide representatives along with a district councilor.
Rather, she said, the 62 percent of Boston voters who approved of ranked-choice voting indicates “a lot of great interest in rank-choice voting and we wanted it here in Boston. I think ranked-choice voting is absolutely a way to break down additional barriers for people running for office, and those that want to run for office.”
Adopting ranked-choice voting isn’t a simple municipal process. The petition now goes to Mayor Michelle Wu for consideration. If the mayor signs on, which her office told CommonWealth Beacon she will, the matter goes to the State House to join Brookline, Acton, Northampton, and Lexington in waiting for lawmakers to allow them to bring the change to the local ballot for approval by residents.
A bill to allow municipalities to skip this Oliver Twist-eqsue process – where legislators from across the state must agree to let localities alter their governing charters – has floundered through the last three sessions. The act to allow a local option for ranked-choice voting in municipal elections, put forward for a fourth time in the state Senate by Sen. Becca Rausch of Needham alongside House counterparts over the years, has been consistently sent to study and killed.
Alongside refiling the ranked-choice voting bill, Rausch has filed a more comprehensive piece of legislation this session that would reduce the need for legislative review of local home rule petitions including but not limited to enabling ranked-choice voting.
“There is very good policy behind the concept of wanting state legislative review for local work that has statewide impact,” Rausch said. “We should keep it for those types of home rule petitions. But those types of home rules are very few and far between.”
Wu’s own election for mayor is occasionally invoked as a potential example of vote-splitting that could have been impacted by ranked-choice.
No Black candidate advanced to the general election despite Andrea Campbell (now state attorney general) and interim Boston Mayor Kim Janey both receiving about 20 percent of the primary vote only to be boxed out for the final by Wu and Annissa Essaibi George. Without any candidate reaching 50 percent in the preliminary, the election would have proceeded to a second round if the city used ranked-choice voting. If the Black voters split between Campbell and Janey, as ranked-choice advocates hypothesize was the case, one of them may well have had a majority of votes in the second round.
In 2020, then-City Councilor Wu told the Boston University News Service that she hoped the ranked-choice ballot measure would succeed.
“This is a state with a huge pipeline of talent, activism and an incredible energy in terms of people participating and wanting to jump into political office,” she said. “Ranked-choice voting makes sure that we are reflecting the true will of the people.”