Boston City Council weighs ranked-choice voting to overhaul local elections

BOSTON — The Boston City Council held its first hearing Thursday on a home rule petition that seeks to overhaul municipal elections by replacing the traditional approach of electing city politicians by popular vote with a ranked-choice voting system.

A trio of progressive councilors, composed of the body’s president Ruthzee Louijeune, Julia Mejia and Henry Santana, are behind the measure, which they say will lead to less acrimony and “mud-slinging” during campaigns and the election of City Council and mayoral candidates with the broadest level of support.

“It’s a system where voters can pick more than one candidate,” Louijeune said at the day’s committee hearing. “Instead of just voting for one candidate, they’re ranking their choices first, second, third and so on. What this means is that their vote always counts, even if their favorite candidate doesn’t win.”

While the hearing drew mainly supportive voices from the community and featured a panel stacked with pro-ranked-choice advocates, the proposed system did not receive a ringing endorsement from the city’s Elections Department, and was met with skepticism from some councilors who said it would be too confusing.

The city’s top election officials, Sabino Piemonte, head assistant registrar of voters, and Eneida Tavares, election commissioner, testified that implementing a new voting system would create operational challenges, additional costs, and prolong the amount of time that it would take to count ballots on election night.

“If ranked-choice voting is adopted in the City of Boston, it will have a significant impact on our current operation,” Tavares said. “Based on initial feedback we have received, we expect higher costs in areas of programming and ballot printing, as well as extended time for counting ballots and certifying the election.”

Tavares said the city’s Elections Department would need to purchase new voting machines to accommodate the new voting system, at a roughly $2 million cost.

Piemonte later noted, however, that the current voting machines, purchased in 2019 for about $1.7 million, are reaching the end of their “useful life” in the next five to seven years, and will soon have to be replaced, even without the proposed change.

The implementation of a more layered ranked-choice voting system would prolong the time it takes election officials to process each ballot, from 30-45 seconds to about a minute or longer, Tavares said.

“Based on our knowledge of ranked-choice voting, one big advantage is that it can eliminate the need for multiple elections,” Tavares said.

Piemonte said ranked-choice voting may also save the city money on that front, in terms of not having to always hold a preliminary election — because of more candidates being eligible to appear on the final municipal election ballot.

Each election costs the city roughly $1 million, Piemonte said, adding that not having a preliminary would result in a “huge savings” to the city and would also eliminate some of the “long, grueling hours” for election workers.

Ranked-choice voting would advance the top four vote-getters, rather than the top two, for the district council and mayoral races to the final election — thus eliminating the need for a primary if four or fewer run.

Voters would then rank up to four candidates in the order of their preference. If no candidate wins a majority, or more than 50% of the first-place votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and all of the ballots that went to them are allocated to voters second-place choices.

If that doesn’t yield a winner, the process is repeated until only two candidates remain, with the winner receiving the majority, or more than 50% of the vote.

For at-large, voters will still narrow down a field of eight at-large candidates to four winners, but rather than picking their four favorite candidates, they’ll rank those candidates in order of preference.

At-large hopefuls with 20% of the first-place vote automatically win a seat, with the remaining votes beyond that threshold for that candidate dispersed to those voters’ second choice. The process then repeats, with the bottom vote-getter eliminated in each round, until four at-large candidates clear the 20% threshold.

It’s a system that has been implemented “across various municipalities and jurisdictions in the United States,” including in New York, California, Hawaii and Maine, the Council petition states, and more locally, in the Massachusetts cities of Easthampton and Cambridge, per testimony provided by city election officials.

Ranked-choice voting was defeated in a statewide referendum in Massachusetts in 2020, but 62% voted in favor of the change in Boston that year. The current home rule petition would need to be approved by the City Council, the mayor, and the Legislature and the question would then be put to voters in a Boston referendum.

“Boston has always been boldly committed to progress and democracy,” Ed Shoemaker, executive director of Ranked Choice Boston, said. “We have made great strides in the last decade to elect a record diverse and inclusive representation. We must ensure that these advances are permanent for administrations to come.

“If new leadership took over that didn’t value equity and fairness, this vital progress would be under threat,” Shoemaker added.

The advocacy-oriented hearing largely honed in on the benefits such a system would create, leading the more moderate Councilor John FitzGerald to remark that, as someone “on the fence,” he would have liked to hear both sides of the argument.

Councilors Sharon Durkan and Ed Flynn, who have been at odds as of late on the Council, both spoke against ranked-choice voting.

Flynn mentioned that it creates a situation where the top-vote getter may not end up winning, while Durkan said the system forces voters to vote for more than one candidate in the final election, and creates “almost a false positive where 2 and 3 may not be your choice.”

“I believe the proposal for ranked-choice voting is complicated, expensive,” Flynn said. “I think there will be delays and actually the person with the most votes may or may not win, so I’m somewhat troubled by that.”