Despite increases in electricity rates over the last few years, turnout in the primary election for those ratemakers did not increase accordingly.
The Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) primaries took place earlier this month, with some thinking this year could be bigger than most because of a host of topics ranging from delayed elections, multiple rate hikes approved from the PSC and costly megaprojects like Vogtle 3 and 4 to catalyze a higher voter turnout.
Instead, turnout was more of the same; of 7.4 million active voters in the state, only 2.8 percent — about 207,954 people — cast their ballots on or before June 17.
In District 3, candidates Keisha Sean Waites and Peter Hubbard will head to a runoff election on July 15 for the Democratic nomination to decide the official nominee ahead of the elections in November. Waites received 46 percent of the vote and Hubbard received 33.3 percent — neither above the 50 percent threshold to claim victory. Robert Jones, who came in third, received 20.7 percent of the votes.
Runoffs generally see less turnout than primaries themselves, meaning turnout in July could be even less than in June. Fox 5 also reports that the runoff election could cost millions in taxpayer money despite the small expected turnout.
At the northern end of the East Coast, a different kind of primary took place.
New York City, the nation’s largest city, underwent a primary for an upcoming November election; the city’s Democratic constituency declared that Zohran Mamdani was their candidate of choice for the Democratic nomination.
Clinching the nomination was big for Mamdani, a 33-year-old New York state representative and self-described democratic socialist, for multiple reasons — one of which being that he would be the first Muslim mayor of the city. Additionally, his grassroots campaign defeated well-known politician Andrew Cuomo, former governor of the state of New York.
Aside from the candidates themselves, however, another story is at play: the use of ranked-choice voting (RCV, also called Instant-runoff voting or IRV) for the primary election, which delivered same-day results for the nation’s largest city. The city saw just below a 30 percent turnout amongst eligible Democrat voters, according to Gothamist.
New York’s use of RCV allowed voters to rank their favorite candidates in order of preference; this meant that instead of simply voting for Cuomo or Mamdani — the two leading candidates by most polls — voters could rank any of the candidates as their number one option, followed by their second and third and so on. Candidates could even rank both Cuomo and Mamdani, although one needed to be higher than the other.
In practice, this meant that the candidates could cross-endorse each other and ask voters to vote for themself as their first option and another candidate as their second choice while not ranking other candidates altogether.
One example of this was seen with Mamdani and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander; each candidate for the Democratic nomination campaigned to be the voters’ first choice but often pointed towards the other candidate for a second or third ranking.
Technically, Mandani hasn’t officially clinched the nomination until all votes are counted; as it stands, he won 43 percent of the first round of votes, with Cuomo in second at 36 percent. Lander was the third-highest voted candidate in the first round of the vote tally at 11.3 percent — and thus will eventually be eliminated after several rounds of eliminating the candidate with the lowest vote count for each round until only two (Mamdani and Cuomo) remain.
Anyone who voted for Lander as their first choice will have their vote transferred to the next-highest-ranking candidate still in the race. For many that is likely to be Mamdani, and this is the reason experts expect the vast majority of the 11.3 percent of first-round votes that Lander got will eventually go to Mamdani, pushing him over 50 percent.
In effect, RCV is supposed to deliver results quicker, allow for less binary-choice elections and save voters money and time with runoff elections. Instead of having Cuomo and Mamdani — neither of which received over the 50 percent threshold for victory on the first ballot — head into a runoff election, voters were able to get their answers in a timely manner, even if technically unofficial.
So why does this matter?
In the Georgia Public Service Commission District 3 Democratic primary, where no candidate won over 50 percent of the vote, the runoff is speculated to cost millions. Fox 5 reported that in one southwest Georgia county, Miller County, only three ballots were counted in the Democratic primary; the Republican primary totaled 40 ballots cast. Miller County has a population of around 6000 people.
If RCV had been implemented in the Public Service Commission primary, voters who ranked Jones above either Waites or Hubbard would have had their vote transferred to their next preferred remaining candidate, either Waites or Hubbard. In other words, that 20.7 percent of votes would have transferred in some fashion to both candidates and pushed one of them above the 50 percent threshold, making them the winner and eliminating the need for any runoff.
Ben Rowley, statewide organizer for a Better Ballot Georgia, which advocates for RCV, said New York City’s RCV primary empowered voters.
“While we don’t endorse or root for any candidate in particular in any race, the system worked as intended by giving New Yorkers a greater range of options at the ballot box, which allowed them to more fully exercise their power as citizens to make decisions for the future of their city,” Rowley wrote to Saporta Report. “RCV allowed candidates in the race to cross endorse, and more broadly speak about common goals as opposed to focusing solely on elevating themselves against all other candidates.”
Regardless of political affiliation or favored candidate, avoiding a costly runoff in New York was a win in the eyes of advocates for RCV — and a lesson lawmakers could take back to Georgia.
“[The New York City primary] juxtaposed with the reality here in Georgia of an election that could cost nearly $100 a vote in taxpayer dollars (as projected in the Fox 5 Atlanta article on the subject) for one party to get a single nominee for one office in an election that likely will get around one percent turnout and that most voters don’t even know is happening to begin with, definitely makes for a stark contrast,” Rowley added.
The future of RCV in Georgia remains uncertain; in March, there was a growing movement in the state house to pass a bill that would ban RCV altogether in the state. The bill passed in the state senate but stalled and died in the house.
Better Ballot Georgia intends to do a voter awareness campaign to bring to light the issues the coalition has with our voting systems today. For now, Georgians — or, specifically, a small fraction of them — will head to the polls once again in July to get a District 3 Democratic nominee ahead of the elections in November.
While it is abhorrent that only 2.8% turned out to vote in the PSC primary, this is a perfect example of where the value of RCV would have come into play. The runoff will almost certainly have even fewer voters, so an even more tiny fraction of the electorate will decide which Democrat faces incumbent commissioner Fitz Johnson. Supporters of Ranked Choice Voting in Georgia should focus on using RCV in primary elections like this one and non-partisan municipal elections like the one coming to Atlanta in November. That’s where the payoff is.