The Ranked-Choice Voting Ponzi Scheme

When Democracy is Inconvenient to Democrats

I'm taking a pause from venting about national issues to talk about the very confusing mayoral Democratic primary election in New York City, and what it means for the Democratic Party.

In recent years, reformers have made New York Democrats, who enjoy closed primaries that limit voter participation on off year elections that attract few people who cope with shifting poll locations, to use something called Ranked-Choice Voting.

Who’s worse for voting, Republicans or Democrats? Yes.

RCV is a fascinating technical idea that is super confusing and not working as intended. It’s basically a Ponzi scheme that funnels votes from more popular candidates to less popular candidates. It was designed by Bernie Madoff. Just kidding about that last part.

2021 was the first NYC Democratic mayoral primary to use RCV. It’s a way of conducting instant run-off votes. It took eight rounds to get to Eric Adams “winning” vote. I use quotes, because many people ranked him low on their list and wound up with him getting their vote, even if he was not their first, second, third or even fourth choice.

The vast majority of New Yorkers consider Eric Adams our worst mayor in a very long time. If the political winds blew a slightly different way, he’d be in prison for corruption.

In 2025, another off year with throttled and shifting voting procedures in New York, progressives have captured the instant-runoff process by flooding the field. Additionally, progressives leverage flaws in RCV by cross-endorsing each other, which is another way of saying two unpopular candidates team up to take down a single prominent candidate whom more voters prefer. It’s a manipulation that detracts from the will of the plurality of the voters.

We’re told this is good for democracy.

Since primaries are closed in our (formerly) deep blue city, extremist candidates are unaccountable to the majority. Republicans and Independents can’t vote for mayor in New York because the Democratic primary winner almost always wins in November.

On the plus side, New York now has early voting. This means you have a week to vote before election day. But guess what? Your early voting booth isn’t in the same place as your election day voting booth. And… if you request a mail-in ballot and don’t use it, or screw it up, like I did once when I messed up the placement of the double envelopes, you can’t vote in person. I called the local voting board. Twice. Didn’t answer.

We have a terrible system that has nothing to do with Republicans. Since Democrats look outwards to cast blame and refuse to ask themselves how, or even if, they should reform, we’re stuck with limited and biased voting.

This election is particularly meaningful because:

1. NYC is huge and always a big deal

2. It’s a prominent Democratic election after Trump’s 2020 2024 win

3. Most candidates are so extreme they’re a credible security threat for, you guessed it, the Jews!

Yes, Jews are my favorite subject, but perhaps Jews facing attack will cause others to wonder if they’re next. Men and working class people already know they are.

Progressives hate Jews first, that’s clear. They sort us into two categories—the Jewish majority who are stoked Israel exists because it’s our historic homeland finally realized after the Holocaust, and a very small Jewish minority who aren’t stoked. Those minor Jews are OK. The problem is, it’s hard to tell us apart. Maybe try armbands?

Since progressives are inclusive when it comes to ranking humans, even if Jews admittedly get the top slot, you too get to participate in their human lottery. For example, pretty much anyone else can aspire to be an ableist racist Islamophobe, which is how progressives call white people. Or maybe they mean working class people of all backgrounds? Or just all men? Or women who aren’t trans? It's a wide net.

First, this RCV primary election is a key issue because the winner will likely be the next mayor of our nation's largest city, which plays a national role and even influences economic and foreign policy. Many good and many bad things happen in NYC that echo around the world. 9/11. The start of Covid in America. Wall Street. The UN. The Media. Broadway. Hip Hop, which went from the Bronx to take over the entire world of pop music. We have an enormous immigrant population. We’re the richest municipality with the largest school district and the biggest police department.

Sixty million visitors from every corner of the world come to NYC each year. We have over 8 million residents, which makes NewYork’s population larger than Ireland, Norway or Denmark. Our political leaders ran for president twice in recent years. They are weather vanes for national politics.

For example, the alarm bells are still ringing at DNC HQ after more and more black voters in the Bronx and Queens went Republican in 2024. Not coincidentally, these black voters are almost all working- or lower middle-class and many didn’t go to college.

In response to their defecting from the party that apparently they have to vote for because of their genetics—again, democracy in action on the left!—Democrats are running around with their hair on fire while throwing money at podcasters. It’s unlikely to win votes, but it burns calories, reduces haircuts and subsidizes young males… before they vote Republican.

The fact that Dems actually pay consultants to tell them to do this is as hilarious as it is sorrowful. Political oblivion couldn’t happen to a nicer party.

Second, the RCV election is a big deal because the NYC Democratic primary battle is the Democratic party battle of the nation, especially before the 2026 midterms.

Will the party lean into an older establishment centrist who doesn’t care for identity preferences and supports the private sector? Or will the party be taken over by younger identity-supremacists with progressive populist economic, criminal justice and housing policies that are red meat for their blue base, despite having no track record of success when they’ve been implemented in other cities?

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Meet the centrists: Andrew Cuomo, Scott Stringer and Whitney Tilson, ranked by popularity. They are white, straight men who identify as white, straight men and are perceived as white, straight men. You don’t need to read their email signatures to know their pronouns, you can just guess.

In the height of the #MeToo era, the first two were accused of relatively minor sexual harassment, which they deny. All charges were either not filed or dropped.

Six candidates—double the centrists which gives them a huge advantage in RCV—are progressive: Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, Adrienne Adams, Zellnor Myrie, Jessica Ramos and Michael Blake, ranked by popularity. These candidates are Muslim Indian, Jewish white, Christian black (Adams, Myrie, Blake) and Christian Latina. They skew younger and are suspicious of the private sector.

They’re not all poor though. Mamdani’s mom is the famous, and I think absolutely amazing film director, Mira Nair. He went to private schools his entire life except for a stint at an elite public high school, and, dollars to donuts, Mamdani venmoes a working class ethnic guy to maintain his luxury condo in Queens. Wonder how that guy votes?

Now that we know what the stakes are: big important city, a political party struggling to find a path, we’ll soon talk about how to actually vote. Yes, this takes a ton of work in New York, a supposed laboratory of democracy.

While this is about New York, ranked choice voting is used more and more across the country in both blue and red states, for a variety of elections. It's also been rejected in many places. There are many smart advocates for the process since it tries to solve the problem of run-off elections where almost no one shows up, and to make people feel that even if the guy or gal who won wasn’t your first choice, you maybe sorta, kinda voted for them as a third or fourth choice, so it feels like you had a say in who will be your temporary ruler, despite their unpopularity. It’s contorted but you can kind of argue that it makes sense.

The problem is RCV is vulnerable to capture by an unpopular mob, which is what’s happening next week.

We're told that RCV, also called instant run-off voting, is more democratic because the winner of a crowded field needs at least 50% of the total vote of everyone who participated. What the advocates don't tell you is that if you have one centrist running against five knuckleheads, in RCV you are forced to vote for four of those five knuckleheads. Otherwise, your vote has a chance of not counting at all.

It's a huge flaw that guess what, goes unremarked in the media. Today, right now, extreme progressives are manipulating the new fangled method to take down Andrew Cuomo, the centrist front runner. And, like I said earlier, since the primary election blocks Independents and Republicans, far left Democrats tilt the field in their favor. They both stack the decks and conspire, publicly, to band together to shift votes. This is called cross-endorsing.

Our city is now at risk of an extremist, Zohran Mamdani, taking over the nation's biggest city with a $100 billion budget and the largest population of Jews outside of Israel, and millions of other vulnerable people. This extremist is Muslim, rich, teaches at the now world famous Columbia University, refuses to condemn the Holocaust, and is very opposed to 7 million Jews being able to live in peace 6,000 miles away from New York in a region of 450 million Arabs.

That’s his hill, but according to the polls and RCV, he won’t have to die on it.

More perplexing to your humble author, many far left Jews will vote for him, despite the bigotry. You’ll remember that many Jews backed Bolshevism. A few years later and a few countries to the west, most Jews felt totally secure with their German-Jewish identities.

Are these people to blame for others’ hatred? Not at all. By why enable it?

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In this election, there are nearly a dozen Democratic primary candidates. You can rank up to five of them on your ballot. It looks like a grid. If you don't rank five, it's very likely your vote will be diluted by someone else who did, and your vote could be tossed. Yes, in NYC, this means you're going to have to apply a molecular analysis of each knucklehead running to see who is least likely to physically sacrifice you on their altar of social justice.

As a Jewish voter in a city with a blue DA who won’t prosecute anti-Jewish rioters, who are now putting their money where their globalize the intifada mouth is with firebombs and shootings, physical attack by Democratic-aligned terrorists is a reasonable concern.

You can assume that the the NYPD Intelligence Bureau and the Jewish Security Community Network will be on high alert during the election. January 6th was bad, absolutely. Now imagine a pogrom in New York City that pits progressives and Islamists against the police and Jews.

Sounds like race war to me. Not a Republican in sight.

Think I sound crazy? The second-most popular candidate who is now endorsed by AOC, Zohran Mamdani, is a member of the DSA—the Democratic Socialists of America. They’re a political organization inspired by Bernie Sanders’ call for “democratic socialism” as a cure for income inequality, and policies to support or to suppress people based on their race, gender identity or sexuality.

On October 8th 2023, a day after the Palestinian invasion of Israel, the official DSA-NYC chapter marched in Times Square to praise the Palestinian attackers and to blame Israelis for being murdered, raped and kidnapped. Most of the Israeli victims were peace activists living on the Israel/Gaza border, or young people partying for “Peace, Love and Infinite Freedom,” or women raped and then murdered.

Religious fundamentalists murdering peace activists didn’t spark support on the left, or a #MeToo rally in defense of female victims of sexual violence. Instead, the DSA-NYC fomented a national campaign at college campuses to call for the annihilation of the Jewish state and its American Jewish supporters.

Yes, college students and faculty advocated for missile strikes and other physical attacks on Americans. That’s what the green headbands, red triangles and calls for intifada mean. Only a few foreigner advocates of terror have been held for deportation by the Trump administration, and were immediately heroicized by the left as martyrs. No American citizens have been incarcerated for inciting violence.

Think that’s old news from 2024? I’m just a curmudgeon muttering about past slights, right? A few weeks ago, another large DSA group announced their support for the killing of a Jew and Israeli in Washington DC. Yes, they support the killing. Undoubtedly they're cheering the torching of elderly Jews in Boulder last week, and the fire bombing of a Jewish governor.

Zohran Mamdani is a member of the DSA. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just endorsed him.

Now you see why I'm concerned.

If we didn't have RCV voting, a pack of extremist, pro-terror bigots who aren't polling well would immediately lose the election and be forgotten.

Not with RCV. Now they get a promotion.

OK, what!? How could this voting scenario happen in America’s most diverse city, and why on earth am I so afraid of people who want to raise taxes for new bureaucracies focused on public safety, healthcare and housing?

Quick history recap for why progressives, or leftists, or whatever you call these new liberals, should be discarded on the historic ash heap of other bad ideas, like Communism and Nazism.

Remember, those Russians and Germans didn’t think they were the bad guys. They were idealists with total certainty they had a political and personal identity solution to improve their countries. If you didn’t agree with them, you were the enemy of progress and on the wrong side of history. Most likely, you also had the wrong identity in their rankings of humans. Sound familiar?

Here’s the recap: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf inspired Arab Islamist nationalism a 100 years ago as they forged a new political identity. The Arab world was shaking off the Ottoman Empire and creating the Arab states we know today like Egypt, Syria, Iraq and so on. This ideology of “pure” Arab Islamic rule has strengthened over time in what is now, outside of a few Gulf states, the poorest region in the world. (The Gulf is about 10% of the Arab world. The other 90% are impoverished.)

Speaking of percentages, the Arab world is now 100% controlled by Arab Muslims of varying degrees of religiosity. Minorities like Kurds, Berbers, Yazidis, Druze and Arab Christians have zero power in any country. The only exception is Israel, with 7 million Jews enjoying sovereignty in their historic homeland. It’s the smallest country in the region. It’s been subject to genocidal wars from “pure” Arab Muslims since before its founding.

In the late 20th century and early 21st century, American college faculty and students chose Arab Islamist nationalism as their cri de coeur for social justice, instead of say, peace, love and understanding as they had in Vietnam War era.

They chose Arab Islamism because they believe that the many perceived injustices of America, like colonization, slavery and Jim Crow, can no longer be reversed anywhere on earth—except in one place!

Yep, the fix to the perceived troubles of the West is to erase the one Jewish state. Then all will be well. This brings American liberals in tight alignment with Arab Islamists. And remember, Arab Islamists were directly inspired by Adolf Hitler.

The insane race theories of the Nazis are now the insane race theories of the progressives, who are growing in power within the Democratic party, at every university and in the media. Nothing to worry about!

Concerned about promoting certain people based on their gender or race, creating conditions for economic fairness, or even protecting basic civic freedoms are eclipsed by the progressive desire to remove Israel, which even casual observers will notice requires war.

Sovereign people aren’t in the habit of suicide when attacked, they tend to arm themselves to the teeth and bite back hard, like in say, Ukraine.

Take my word for it that Arab Islamism is very bad and the left wing, like in the Bolshevik era and the later Nazi era, has fallen into a rabbit hole of idealism that, when combined with antisemitism, justifies terrorism. We’re seeing this now in America on an almost weekly basis.

Many sarcastic observers note that Arab Islamists would happily execute their genderqueer allies in America instead of watching Netflix, but that’s not really the threat. It’s more likely that Arab Islamists will simply convert their progressive friends to become terrorists, like the Washington DC shooter Elias Rodriguez or Columbia students hospitalizing janitors who get in their way.

ISIS is well known for inspiring lone-wolf suicide attacks across North America and Europe. This is what’s happening now, just substitute calls for “Free, Free Palestine” from ISIS to spot the trend.

These are the same calls at Zohran Mamdani gatherings. He himself founded Students for Justice Palestine at Bowdoin College. It’s $91,500 a year to attend.

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How this all relates to Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) in New York is a short story. By any measure—participation rates, youth engagement, media support, influencers, crowd-funded donations, the many young politicians running in primaries against older, centrist incumbents—the progressive movement in the Democratic party is ascendant. This is particularly true here in New York.

The most two prominent progressives in America either come from, or currently live in, New York City: Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They’re followed by a long and growing list of backers across the arts, entertainment, the media, and at all levels of politics.

California’s Bay Area doesn’t hold a candle to New York progressives.

This is all to say that when Democrats now run for office in New York, they are disproportionately progressive, despite their growing unpopularity as measured by polls and primary defeats, like Jamaal Bowman’s loss. By concentrating their power—disallowing non-Democrats to vote—and by rigging elections—using novel voting tactics like RCV—progressives seize power far beyond any definition of small-d democracy.

Trump took over his party over a ten year period, as measured by primaries and Presidential elections. Had the public been aware of Biden’s health in 2020, it’s likely Trump would have also won that election. Republicans are now very, very different from the Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney years.

Politics, like Newton’s third law of motion, has equal and opposite reactions. Years after Trump’s ascension in the 2015 Republican primaries, the Democratic party is at long last transforming in response to both MAGA Republicanism and to their many losses.

What’s different is that the Democratic party uses the underhanded, illiberal tactics consistent with the left’s behavior of the past several decades. Trump just won more votes. My argument is that RCV, a liberal voting concept, is now enabling more of this left-wing illiberal behaior. The fact that this is happening by design or by hostile takeover is besides the point.

Let me prove my observation about illiberal left-wing tactics. These are well documented and are perhaps beginning to recede now that Republicans control every branch of government.

The left has been responsible for free speech crackdowns, censorship, news coverups and public shaming. This has been well reported by respected left-wing thinkers like Jonathan Chait and many others. “Wokeness” centered on what not to do, what not to say and what not to think.

The vanguard of progressive thinking and mandates offered a negative policy framework rather than a positive vision for the future. Microaggresions, dead-naming, misgendering, dehumanizing, de-platforming, antiracism and canceling are negative prescriptions. These are unique to the left. They also demonstrate how progressives continue to behave politically to this day.

In the New York election, progressives outnumber centrist candidates but they’re far less popular.

The problem is that RCV, also called instant run-off voting, means that a swarm of opponents overwhelms the lead candidate by design. Remember, the lead candidate is in the lead because more people like him. RCV inverts your vote by forcing you to pick candidates you don’t want.

Wait, couldn’t you just not choose 5 candidates and only focus on one or two politicians you can stomach? While you can, technically, not complete your ballot and still have your vote tallied, to do so dilutes your vote and gives an advantage to your neighbor who fills out all five. It disadvantages you to incomplete the form.

In a later post I may get into the mechanics of how RCV works, but, for now, please accept the premise that RCV requires total participation to work. It’s not binary voting—yes or no per candidate. It requires ranking of candidates. In this particular election that’s for five people.

To make ranking work correctly, voters have to rank all five. This facilitates the instant run-off rounds. Again, your vote will technically count if you don’t complete the ballot, but if the election moves to run-off rounds, which it will, and if your top one or two choices aren’t in later run-off rounds, then your vote is tossed out.

Since it’s impossible to predict what the results will be, especially in an era of discredited polling and ideologically-biased media, it’s in each voter’s best interest to complete their ballot. Trust me on this.

You’re supposed to vote five times. If you don’t and someone else does, it’s likely you will lose.

This year, in New York, there are 9 top candidates out of 11 total contenders.

Out of the nine, there are three centrists, only one of whom is popular—Cuomo. They are running against six progressives. Of those six, also only one is popular—Mamdani—but less popular than Cuomo. Since Mamdani has more fellow progressives running, and since it’s very rare in a crowded field for a candidate to immediately get more than 50% of the vote, it’s certain we’ll see instant run-off rounds.

In 2021, the first time RCV was used, Eric Adams won after a total of 8 runoff rounds. Eight rounds! That's how unpopular all of the candidates were.

Just like this election, 2021 was also a crowded field with no Democratic incumbent. (Eric Adams is running as an independent so isn’t in the Democratic primary.) It’s reasonable to predict that we’ll see a similar dynamic this year with many runoff rounds.

Remember, Eric Adams won the RCV primary, which, in blue New York, guaranteed his eventual win in the November general election.

Adams was indicted for federal crimes under the Biden administration that were later dropped by the Trump administration. He has the worst polling in thirty years of tracking the New York mayor’s office according to the Quinnipiac Poll.

Why this is likely to happen again, but substitute the word terrorism for corruption, is why you should advocate for change and definitely not believe anything you hear from Democratic sources.

Until then, if you’re a registered Democratic voter in NYC and can figure out where and how to vote, I suggest ranking the top three centrists. I wish you luck as you’re forced to vote for another two candidates, all of whom believe bigotry solves racism and who ignore the antisemitism rampaging across our country. Maybe choose Cuomo / Stringer / Tilson / Blake / Lander. Definitely pray.