A Critical Look at the Race for Mayor

by: David Coffee
September 19, 2005


After hearing the results of last week’s Mayoral Primary, I couldn’t help but feel frustrated. In the beginning of the race we had over eight candidates, many of whom were political outsiders who were simply interested in helping improve their beloved community. They entered the race simply because they felt an obligation to do their part to help all of Buffalo. After the primary we lost our inspiring candidates, and we found ourselves immersed in the same old political nonsense, complete with name-calling and devoid of issues. We need to free ourselves from ‘politics as usual’ and the way to do it is to change our voting system so that it more accurately reflects the will of the people.

The Buffalo news on Friday described the Brown-Helfer mayoral contest as a battle between “two political heavyweights.” Now I’m not a gambler but I’m willing to bet that nobody in this city would describe their ideal mayor as a ‘political heavyweight’. That says a lot about the trap that we find ourselves in. Our system has lead us down a narrow hallway, and at the end we find two candidates that nobody really wants. The system is not working, so the responsible thing to do is change the system. I’m not talking about getting a candidate elected, I’m talking about changing the rules that we use to elect our public officials.

There are many ways to translate democratic intent into political representation, and statistically our Winner-take-all plurality system is the worst. Elections like ours use a very simple method to select the winner, the candidate with the most votes wins. This is fine when there are only two candidates, but with three or more there is a possibility that the most favored candidate will lose. A candidate who would normally win in a two-way race might have their votes ‘stolen’ by a third candidate and therefore hand the election to a candidate who doesn’t actually have the support of the majority. This is the dilemma that led Steve Calvanesso to drop out of the primary early. He didn’t want to steal votes from Kevin Gaughan thereby helping Byron Brown win the nomination. If we had used a system of Instant Runoff Voting this problem could have been avoided entirely, voters would have three choices, and they could vote for their favorite candidate without fear of helping their least favorite candidate.

It is very possible to deal with this problem. The most efficient and democratic way is through Instant Runoff Voting. It works like this: After the votes are cast, the least favored candidates are eliminated from the ballot until someone achieves a majority of the votes. Voters rank the candidates in order of preference, if their first choice receives the smallest number of votes and is eliminated from the ballot their second choice is used. This process is repeated until one candidate has a majority. If Brown Gaughan and Calvaneso were competing and Gaughan ended up with the least number of votes he would be eliminated and his voters would use their second choice vote instead. The result would truly express the will of the voters, instead of making them frustrated.

Unlike the Runoff election used in the New York City Democratic primary, Instant Runoff Voting is much less costly or time consuming. The New York City Runoff election requires everyone to come back and vote again if nobody receives a majority in the first round of voting. Instant Runoff voting allows voters to rank their candidates so that they only need to vote once. If a voters first choice is eliminated they will use their second choice instead.

Why does it matter? What difference will it make? In this case, Calvaneso wouldn’t have dropped out. And voters would have been able to choose freely between three candidates without worrying about ‘wasting’ their vote or ‘spoiling’ the election by allowing someone to win with less than 50% of the vote.

We could easily use Instant Runoff Voting in our Democratic primary, or in any City or County election. It doesn’t take a federal or state law to change our system of voting, our community decides how we want to elect our own officials.

Think about it, does our current system elect the candidates that people want? What would happen if voters could record their true preference, rather than strategically voting for the lesser of two evils because they were scared of wasting their vote on a third candidate? And what about the candidates, would more people run? With additional candidates, would we talk about other issues and hear more diverse solutions? And what would happen to Buffalo if we had a vibrant public discourse led by the many candidates in each election? And what if our citizens could vote for any of those eight candidates without fear of their vote not counting, would thousands more people turn out to vote? I’m willing to bet that the change would be dramatic.

It’s not that we don’t have honest, qualified people running for office, the problem is that they are squeezed out of the race before the general public gets a chance to vote for them. Or they show up on the ballot as a third party that nobody acknowledges because we don’t want to waste our vote. We are all tired of the political machines, empty promises, and incompetent public officials, but we can’t seem to overcome them. We have good candidates but our system makes them so hard to elect. The most important thing we can do to get ourselves out of this mess is to change the rules of the system.