How about the winner wins? That’s our simple answer to the runoff problem.
Last Tuesday, Letitia James beat Dan Squadron in the Democratic primary runoff for public advocate. Only 180,000 of the city’s 2.97 million registered Democrats turned out to vote in the primary runoff for public advocate. That’s a turnout of about 6 percent in an election that cost $13 million for an office whose entire annual budget is $2.3 million.
Not surprisingly, that has people calling for “reform.” There’s already legislation to set up an instant runoff, in which voters would rank all the candidates by order of preference. If no one gets 40 percent, the bottom candidate is eliminated until someone reaches the threshold.
The runoff for citywide office came after the 1969 primary, in which conservative Mario Procaccino won the Democratic mayoral primary over a split field of liberals. He went on to lose the general election.
Proponents say a runoff prevents someone from winning with only a tiny percentage of the vote in a crowded field.
But how is that worse than what we have now, which is someone winning the second-highest city office in an election in which 94 percent of voters didn’t participate? Besides, does anyone trust the city’s Board of Elections — which didn’t finish counting the primary votes until four days before the scheduled runoff — to handle an even more complicated procedure?
Better to junk the whole runoff system for something much simpler, less expensive and closer to democracy: The man or woman who comes in first wins.