> This year’s elections will be fascinating for another reason: the city’s 2019 adoption of ranked-choice voting (RCV) has encouraged more candidates to throw their hats into the ring—50, at last count. (In 2013, the last election with no incumbent in the race, only ten candidates competed.) > The theory behind RCV is that empowering voters to rank multiple candidates, rather than pick just one, encourages more candidacies by increasing the number of votes in play. A voter need not restrict his choice to one of the well-funded primary frontrunners; instead, he can rank up to five candidates. If any candidate gets 50 percent or more first-rank votes, he wins. If none hits the 50 percent threshold, the lowest-scoring candidate is eliminated, and his second-rank votes get added to the vote tallies of the others. This process of winnowing the laggard candidates and transferring their second preferences continues until someone achieves 50 percent. RCV thus aims to reward the candidate most liked by voters generally.