Will Rank Choice Voting Confusion Give Lobbyists the Opportunity to Gain Full Control of the City Council?

By: Gary Tilzer

Even the old pros of NYC politics have no idea who will win most of the city council races. That is because almost every race will have multi candidate fields (Some have as much as 10 candidates) which will be determined by the new untested and unpredictable Rank Choice Voting (RCV) system. In multi-candidate races it is impossible to predict or poll the order of a candidates dropping out. There is also no way to predict or poll who the drop out candidates will have as their 2nd, 3rd ,4th, or 5th choices. In other words RCV new counting system is a roll of the dice, impossible to analyze or control.

Most New Yorkers do not know about RCV or how it works (see more below). These voters are likely to vote for only one candidate. A poll by WPIX in March showed that only 40% of New Yorkers knew about ranked-choice voting; almost 50% of the minority voters were unaware of RCV.

Winning after the first ballot using the RCV counting system will depend little on candidate’s support in the district. It will be decided by the candidate who makes the best cross endorsement deals with their opponents. It will also depend on a candidate’s union, ideological political machine support-like the Working Families Party and the Democratic Socialists of America who will tell their members who to vote as their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th choice, making those candidates more likely to win in later counting rounds of RCV. Critics believe RCV gives more weight to ideological and union voters, making RCV an unfair way of deciding elections. It is a self-made disaster for NYC government to make major changes to the city’s vote counting system before the most important NYC election ever. It should not have been tested in a year when most of city government is being changed because of term limits.

While a lot has been written in the press about how important it is that the next mayor to be an experienced manager, nothing has been written about the abilities of the new council, the co-leaders with the mayor of city government. We know from the current council that many members are not up to the job. There are now running candidates who never had a real job and running with the help of lobbyists with over $100,000 in city matching money. Some of them will get elected.

Historically the power of the city council resides in the Council Speaker positions. The Speaker assigns council members to chairs of committees who audit the city, puts together the budget with the mayor and cuts the deals to hide the member item money in the budget.

Historically, the county leaders battle each other to pick the new council speaker. In the last two council speaker races the mayor and lobbyists campaign consultants, who now run most of the council campaigns, invited themselves into the smoke-filled room with county leaders to pick the last two council speakers, Cory Johnson (2018) and Melissa Mark-Viverito (2014).

In the past, former Queens county leader Joe Crowley played the lead role in picking the new speaker since most of his borough council delegation was held together by the consultant lobbyists the Parkside Group. Crowley resigned as Queens Democratic County Leader after he lost his congressional seat to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC). With Crowley gone, there is nobody that Kathryn Wylde’s NYC Partnership, the Times or what is left of the city’s establishment can reach and make sure the next council speaker will fight to reduce crime, fix the city’s financial crisis, and solve the city’s long standing problems with homelessness, lack of affordable housing and education.

AOC is not the only ideological machine that has weakened the control of the elected Democratic Party county leaders over the last decade. The Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists of America and the Anti-IDC coalition all work for the liberal unions and lobbyist consultants who are involved in most of the council races. The lobbyist consultant Scott Levinson’s Advance Group is working for 10 council candidates this year and Doug Forand’s Red Horse for 12. Levinson comes from the very progressive leaning ACORN and Forand’s website represents that he seeks to elect progressives and that he works for progressive organizations. They and other lobbyists stepped into the void created by the weakened county leaders who are no longer running council campaigns.

Other lobbyist consultants who stepped into the void and are working for several city council candidates this year include: Mark Guma Communications, Jonathan Yedin’s Power Play Strategies, Rebecca Katz’s New Deal Strategies, Luis A. Miranda, Jr., and Roberto Ramirez’s Hamilton Campaign Network (the new MirRam Group), Even Stavisky’s Parkside Group, Hank Sheinkopf’s Meridian Strategies. The late Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett said in 2010: Sheinkopf elects Kings (elected officials) so he can eat the Kings Meat (get pay to play patronage for his clients).

The lobbyists will use the council members they elected to select the new city council speaker. There is no doubt that the unelected lobbyists will then use the new council speaker to deliver the zoning changes or contracts their clients pay for, adding to the existing pay to play corruption in the city.

The current city matching fund programs seem to create a lobbyist controlled shadow government in NYC. Berlin Rosen who works for gentrification developers such as Two Trees is working for comptroller candidate Brad Lander, whose political base are the new gentrifying residents of Brooklyn, brought into the city by the Berlin Rosen’s developers. Bill Hyers was de Blasio’s campaign manager in 2013, when the mayor was arrested to protest the closing of LICH hospital. Hyers is a lobbyist for Airbnb and became the lobbyist for the luxury developer building on the LICH hospital site after the mayor closed the hospital in his first year in office. The Advance Group works for real estate developer Edison Parking, which is being criticized as the main developer benefiting from de Blasio’s plan to change the zoning in lower Manhattan. The Advance Group acquired Edison Parking as a client in 2013, after it helped its then owner Steve Nislick, who was funding a PAC run by the Advance Group, NYCLASS. NYCLASS was supposed to ban horse carriages in central park but was used to go around the matching fund spending limits to raise money for running commercials which destroyed Speaker Quinn’s mayoral campaign in 2013. That same year Mark-Viverito was fined for using illegal help from the Advance Group to become speaker. The Advance Group was fined by the Campaign Finance Board for using NYCLASS funds it controlled to contribute to two council campaigns it was running. One city council campaign was Mark Levine’s, who was fined and is currently running for Manhattan Borough President.

The current NYC matching fund program encourage campaign consultant lobbyists pay to play corruption. The lobbyists have taken over the NYC election system, turning it into a turnkey operation run by consultants. Candidates can now hire lobbyist consultants to manage their campaigns, fundraise and to collect their petitions to get on the ballot.

When Albanese sat on the NYC Charter Commission a couple of years ago he tried to replace the city’s matching funds program with a Seattle matching fund program called “Democracy Vouchers.” Under the Democracy Voucher system the government gives four $25 vouchers to registered voters and asks voters to assign their vouchers to their preferred candidates, leading to money disbursed to candidates.

Democracy Vouchers are the most democratizing and egalitarian method of public funding for a campaign that has been invented, according to Albanese. It makes every eligible participant in the city worth the same amount to a candidate, whether they’re a bartender or a bank president.” Democracy Vouchers system does not allow lobbyists to raise money for candidates with no community ties that will only be loyal to the lobbyists that elected them. The vouchers will also cut down large multi-candidate races. The city will not waste millions funding candidates who have no support in the district they are running in.

 

How the Rank Choice Voting System Works:

If a candidate wins an outright 50% plus one vote or what is called the majority of first-preference votes, he or she will be declared the winner. If no candidates wins an outright majority of first-preference votes, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. The second-preference choice is then counted for the candidate that was eliminated and counted for the remaining field. A new tally is conducted to determine whether any candidate has won an outright majority of the adjusted voters. 5. The process is repeated until a candidate wins a majority of votes cast.

There is at least a half dozen contenders for the speaker job so far, according to City & State’s reporting: Alicka Ampry-Samuel of Brownsville, Adrienne Adams of Jamaica, Justin Brannan of Bay Ridge, Keith Powers of Midtown and the Upper East Side, Carlina Rivera of the Lower East Side and Rafael Salamanca Jr. of the South Bronx.