The Town of Newburgh will be the first place in New York State to have proportional rank choice voting. New York City has regular rank choice voting for the mayoral primaries but proportional rank choice is quite different.
Last week the Town of Newburgh, not to be confused with the City of Newburgh, agreed to change how it elects the Town Council, and adopted a proportional rank choice voting system.
The change comes after residents sued the town in March of 2024 under the New York State Voting Rights Act, arguing that the current at-large voting system weakened Black and brown voting power.
Ernesto Tirado says for years he and other residents could not figure out why the candidates Black and Brown people voted for consistently lost.
“Well, I've been living here for over 30 years, and in those 30 years, we never really had our candidate of choice get elected. I'm a strong believer that government, whether it be federal, state or local, should represent the people they serve. The town board was not ever the case,” Tirado said.
Tirado said the Town Council had been primarily white, male, and Republican for as long as he could remember. But when the Voting Rights Act of New York passed in 2022, everything clicked.
“And as I read the clip version of that law, you know, it seemed like those situations match our situation perfectly,” said Tirado.
Attorney David Imamura, who represented the residents, said this was precisely the purpose of the law – to give communities of color a seat at the table.
“So in the case of the town of Newburgh, the Black and Hispanic population makes up 40% of the town, but had never elected a town council person ever as of the time the lawsuit was filed,” Imamura explained. “So you had a situation where the Black and Brown communities were 40% of the population but had 0% of the power.”
Imamura said this translated into real life problems for residents. For example, he said Newburgh is roughly 25% Hispanic but doesn’t translate many town documents into Spanish.
“And this is true for minor traffic infractions. This is true for like documents in the town court. So for a document where you're pleading to a settlement, deal that could put you in jail, it’s not translated into Spanish. So there are major policy impacts arising from the lack of representation,” said Imamura.
Tirado said this also translated into lots of development getting the go-ahead from the Town Council without any pushback.
“Because if you went to a town board meeting, it was always the same thing. Everybody approved when it came to vote on something. All the council people all voted, yes, yes, yes. I mean, there was rarely any opposition or questioning of anything,” Tirado said.
The conversation with the Town of Newburgh was initially focused on districting. But right before the trial the town settled and chose to adopt proportional rank choice voting.
The residents’ legal team suggested this would be a good option for the Black and Brown residents to get better representation. Tirado and the other residents agreed to the settlement, in part because the lawsuit was already costing the town millions of dollars in legal fees, including $1.6 million dollars for the residents' lawyers.
Scott Minkoff, associate professor at SUNY Paltz and Democracy Fellow at Vote America, explained regular rank choice voting for one candidate, like New York City has in the mayoral primaries, is different from proportional rank choice voting.
The town supervisor will be voted on in a regular rank choice vote with one winner. But for town council, two candidates will win, and that’s where the math gets more complicated.
“The number of votes you need to get elected is equal to the total number of voters divided by the number of seats plus one,” Minkoff explained.
Then there are the surplus votes. If a winning candidate gets more votes than they need, those extra votes don't just sit there — they get redistributed to each of those voters' next-ranked choices, at a proportionally reduced weight, Minkoff explained.
This way, no votes are wasted, and voters whose first choice already has a secure win still have a say in who fills the remaining seat.
Minkoff said that the error rate for proportional rank choice voting is higher, because someone might forget to rank their candidates and put four candidates all for No. 1, which would cause an error.
He said there’s a lot of nuance, but compared to a regular election for two seats with a white majority population, white candidates would just keep on winning.
“Because the brown and Black population isn't a majority, but it is a sizable portion. So the white candidates weren't running against each other, they were running with each other, whereas under this circumstance, white candidates are now essentially running against each other, and the brown candidates are doing that too. Now everybody's running against everybody, and that makes a difference for the math,” said Minkoff.
Minkoff said the proportional ranked choice system is much more common in Europe, so he’s interested to see how it will work in New York.
The Newburgh Town Council elections are staggered, so two of the four seats are up every two years. Two years later, the other two seats will be up for election.
The Town of Newburgh did not respond to WAMC's request for comment.
Attorney Imamura said this lawsuit could set a precedent for residents in other places in New York.
Tirado says if minority residents feel their votes are not being counted they should research the New York State Voting Rights Act.
“And I'm hoping, yeah, does inspire the communities around the country to at least look into it as an option if they're not getting any other satisfaction.”
