Rank Choice Voting Seminar with Manny Behar

hi my name is israel pesquitz i'm the community affairs coordinator for kazakh i'm here to introduce the wonderful manny bahar who explained to you the ins and outs of ranked choice voting and how to properly use your vote for its maximum effectiveness to help yourself your community and the entire city one of the most important elections in our history is coming up right around the corner and what's at stake is the mayor the public advocate the controller the borough president and the city council why does that matter because these are the people who make the decisions that impact on our community that impact on our lives everything from support to israel to funding for jewish institutions like hazak it's all at stake in the upcoming primary this year for the first time new york city is using rank choice voting in a primary that means that you don't just vote for your first choice you can rank up to five candidates in order of preference and this works for us very well because it gives us the opportunity to vote for our first choice who we really want but unfortunately there are some we really don't want and we can rank more candidates up to five for each office ahead of the one we really don't want to make sure that the one we don't want doesn't get in uh that we can get our next choice if our first choice falls short so this is how it works you're going to be getting a ballot and this is not the real one this is just a theoretical one and you're going to say like for mayor you would mark your first choice you would fill in the oval where it says first over here you would go with your second choice let's say over here third choice over here and fourth over here so that is how you would fill it out now what happens is that they count the votes they count the votes at the first choice votes whoever finishes last is uh if somebody gets 50 or more of the vote they get a majority they are the winner but if nobody gets a majority of the vote the person who finished last is out and their votes are reallocated to their next choice and this goes on until somebody gets a majority the idea of this is that the old under the old system somebody let's say in a very crowded race let's say with eight candidates who gets 25 of the vote could come in first even though 75 of the people in that district can't stand that person uh under the new system that person may still come in first on the first round but on the other rounds the other candidates will pick up more support they're very likely to lose in the end so this is how we can make it work for us now let's take an historical example use some historical figures to explain how this would work let's say we have four candidates in an election david amelech abraham lincoln fidel castro and adolf hitler we have one who obviously is our first choice we have one who we certainly would not want under any circumstances who we absolutely must defeat we have one who's pretty good and one we really don't like but he's better than the other one so we would rank david melech first abraham lincoln's second fidel castro third we would rank those three we'd even have to rank fidel castro number three uh it would be a big mistake to just vote for david amella and leave the rest blank because if you vote for david melech and he falls short then your vote doesn't count in the future rounds and that means you could actually be helping christopher shalom to help adolf hitler to win that election so it is absolutely critical that you rank more than one but it's important the way to do it you've got to do it the way we have it on this page do not rank the same candidate for for all five spots or even more than one do not rank more than one person as number one that will invalidate your ballot so rank them in order of preference as we did here the uh there it's important again to stress that there are people on the ballot that are really good there's some that are really bad and that we have to make wise choices so uh may hashem give us the wisdom to vote wisely and will the one who is noting hashem give whoever is elected the compassion and the wisdom to do what's right for the jewish people for new york and for all of us thank you very much