No One Votes in City Council Elections

What are the 2021 and 2023 City Council voting inputs? // Who represents the people more: the mayor or the Council?

Occasionally people will note how uncompetitive the New York City Council elections are. Sebastian has a great write-up here that notes how few people actually run, and how most City Council races are not meaningfully competitive.

This post takes the point even further: not only are the races uncompetitive, almost no one votes in them. This is the result of several factors, like off-cycle city elections and the relative obscurity of city offices.

As Alex Armlovich notes, this produces tragicomedy: New York City is not democratic in any meaningful way!¹ There are two ways to look at this: (1) the City Council does not represent the vast majority of people who live here, or (2) it doesn’t take too many people getting together to change who wins a race! I prefer to focus on the second point.

Let’s now compare the City Council races from 2021 to 2023, using general election data. The map below shades each district based on how much the winner’s vote total declined from 2021 to 2023. There was no need to account for any district increasing its winner’s vote total, since that didn’t happen in any district.²

Although the Council was redistricted from 2021 to 2023, most districts did not change that much. I think it is reasonable to compare the two, adjusting for outliers (see footnote 2).

Only District 19, represented by Vickie Paladino, managed to stay relatively even with a ~7% decline. Otherwise, the picture is stark. The Council has 51 districts, and essentially every district faced a tremendous decline:

• 21 districts declined by more than 50%

• 19 districts declined by 40-50%

• 9 districts declined by 30-40%

• Tiffany Caban’s district 22 declined by 24%

• Justin Brannan’s district 47 (see footnote 2) declined by 13%

• Vickie Paladino’s district 19 declined by 7%

But perhaps you’d like to see the absolute number of votes and voting rates as well. After all, a district winner’s vote total could decline by 50%—but if they had a massive amount of votes in the 2021 election, their overall vote total in 2023 could still be fine. As we’ll see, that isn’t the case anywhere.

I’ll show you both the 2021 and 2023 elections, and we’ll look at: absolute number of votes won by the winner, voting rates, victory margins, total registered voters, and a direct comparison of voting inputs for the Council and the mayor.

The 2021 election was a mayoral race, which pushes turnout up for down-ballot races the same way a presidential election does; the 2023 City Council election was a result of redistricting, so members had to run for their new districts after just two years in office—otherwise they run every four years.

Absolute number of votes

This graph shows the amount of votes each district winner received in 2021 and 2023. Vote totals fell universally.

Voting rates

Voting rates are calculated by dividing the number of successful votes by the number of registered voters. As you can see, rates are low in both 2021 and 2023. Only Joe Borelli, the Republican from Staten Island, managed to get reasonably close to a democratic quorum in participation in 2021 (at least 50% of registered voters).

Victory margins per district

Most City Council members win their district by incredibly high margins. This is a function of one-party rule, low voter turnout, and general lack of competition. But there are always a few competitive seats—you’ll note that district 19 was only won by a plurality in 2021 by Vickie Paladino; she consolidated her victory in 2023 with a 60% margin.

Registered, eligible voters

The total number of registered voters across all 51 City Council districts fell by 400,166 between the 2021 and 2023 citywide elections (from 4,992,792 to 4,592,626).

One interesting note: each district sends 1 person to the City Council, but they have radically different amounts of voters (both active and registered). Due to foreign immigration and different rates of children, not every district has the same amount of adult, eligible voters. So each City Council Member is answerable to a variable amount of voters—disproportionate representation happens everywhere, no matter how you slice it!

The Mayor versus the City Council

Especially with the potential expansion of Council advice and consent in the news, there have been some politics jabs about “who represent the people more”—the mayor or the City Council. This is not as straightforward to calculate as one might think.

Note: the mayor is elected every four years. The last mayoral election was 2021, the next is 2025. Since the Council was redistricted, they had an election in 2021 and 2023, and their next two elections are 2025 and 2029.

In 2021, the winners of all 51 Council districts pulled in 841,282 votes, and the total amount of successful votes cast in Council races was 1,057,156. This compares to the mayor’s 753,801 out of 1,125,258.

This means that more people participated via vote in the mayoral contest, but the winning Council candidates received more votes than the mayor. However: this isn’t apples to apples.

The Council is a composite body, and five of those members were Republicans, totaling 98,200 votes. If you subtract them, you’re left with 743,082—or 10,719 fewer votes than the mayor.

This gets even more complicated, because some candidates like Robert Holden (D30) were endorsed by both the Republican and Democratic parties, even though Holden, for example, is a Democrat. And Ari Kagan (2021 D43) switched from the Democratic to the Republican party after he won his seat in 2021 (his vote totals are not reflected in the 98,200 above).

Finally: the Council winners only brought in 444,591 out of 551,046 votes in their 2023 election, putting them far below the mayor’s 2021 total (he will not be up for re-election until 2025, when the whole Council will be up again as well). There is no debating that the current Council is a product of far fewer voters than the current mayor.

If you want to know “who represents the most people” between the mayor and City Council, it’s hard to say. But I’d say the balance of the facts point the mayor, if your only metric is vote totals.

1. If your definition of “democracy” means something like “majoritarian inputs into elected office,” this would require at least (or near) a 50% turnout of eligible voters. NYC does not come anywhere close to this electoral quorum in any of its electoral districts.

2. The one exception to this is in district 47. Between 2021 and 2023 there was a redistricting, so the district lines changed. In most cases these were small changes, although in a few cases it caused meaningful changes in data—here it put two existing incumbents in the same district, and they had to fight it out. If you have suggestions for how my map should be altered in response to this, let me know!

One big change I’ll note: Justin Brannan was in district 43 in 2021, but the redistricting put him in district 47 with Ari Kagan—both of these men were incumbents, but with vastly different abilities to get votes. So I had a choice to make when visualizing this graph: in the 2023 district 47, do I compare the winner’s vote total (Justin Brannan) to Ari Kagan’s total in 2021 (since he was the “old district 47”), or do I compare them to Justin Brannan’s performance in his 2021 district, district 43? I chose the latter. Otherwise I would be comparing Ari Kagan’s very low 2021 vote total to Justin Branna’s comparatively higher total, resulting in a 40%+ increase from 2021 to 2023. This is not actually what happened. Justin Brannan’s vote total fell by almost 13% between the two elections. I left the new district 43 alone, so it perhaps shows a larger drop between 2021 and 2023 than you might otherwise see—but it is in keeping with overall trends around the city.