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.