> A truly surreal situation is unfolding as the votes are being tallied in the New York City mayor’s race. It appears that “ranked-choice voting” has reduced the lead of Eric Adams, the former cop and Brooklyn borough president, to just 16,000 votes. On primary night last week, Adams was coasting after receiving 31 percent of the vote to his closest rival Kathryn Garcia’s 19 percent. > But ranked-choice voting came into play because Adams didn’t receive 50 percent of the vote. In ranked-choice voting, voters can list up to five candidates on their ballots in order of preference. “If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round, the winner is decided by a process of elimination: As the lower-polling candidates are eliminated, their votes are reallocated to whichever candidate those voters ranked next, and the process continues until there is a winner” according to the New York Times. > The process not only led to voter confusion but also confused local election officials in New York. After promising to release the first batch of ranked-choice ballots on Tuesday, the board of elections was forced to “retract” the results because they had accidentally failed to remove 150,000 images of ballots designed to test the ranked-choice voting system. I disagree that RCV us the cause of the chaos. The chaos lands squarely in the lap of the incompetent election officials themselves.