How Mamdani Should Reform New York City’s Elections
Proportional representation could help the city council reflect the voters it serves.
When New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his new charter revision commission—the “Commission on Government Efficiency”—last month, he said it would “identify the reforms we need to deliver faster, smarter, and more effectively for working people.” The commission replaces an earlier one established by former Mayor Eric Adams focused in part on electoral reform. Mamdani’s new commission should not abandon that effort. Instead, it should examine whether proportional representation—and perhaps a larger city council—would make city government more representative of the voters it serves.
Done right, proportional representation would better channel the political fragmentation that already exists in New York, not create more of it. That’s what we found in our new Manhattan Institute report, which uses the results from last year’s council races to simulate alternative electoral systems. In the process, we found evidence of a democratic deficit on two fronts.
First, the council’s current single-seat districts underrepresent voters who are politically aligned but geographically dispersed. Last November, right-of-center parties won more than a fifth of the citywide vote but only about a tenth of council seats.
Second, the city’s politics are increasingly multiparty, yet remain locked in an institutional structure designed for two-party competition. The city has at least three recognizable blocs: socialist Democrats, establishment Democrats, and a Republican-Conservative coalition.
In fact, the report finds that New York City has effectively 3.3 parties by the standard measure of party fragmentation used in political science. By contrast, the typical U.S. House election is closer to two.
Ranked-choice voting, adopted for New York City primaries in 2019, did not alter this dynamic. It has made factional contests more complex without making the council more representative of the electorate’s views. With no ballot cues to guide them, primary voters also face the difficult task of ranking up to five candidates.
By contrast, proportional representation systems—which give seats to parties in proportion to their vote shares—address both problems we identified. By aggregating votes across larger geographic districts and electing multiple winners from each, they give politically dispersed groups a better chance to convert support into seats. They also allow the city’s political factions to compete more openly before the full electorate.
Our report models outcomes under two realistic proportional representation systems. The first is open-list proportional representation, under which each borough would elect multiple council members roughly in proportion to each party’s share of the vote. The second is mixed-member proportional representation, which would retain the city’s 51 current council districts while adding 20 citywide seats to bring parties seat shares closer to their vote shares.
Those concerned that proportional representation would vastly disrupt who gets elected need not be. In the open-list model, 47 of the 51 winners in the 2025 election still prevail. In the mixed-member model, all 51 district winners keep their seats.
Assuming the same voting behavior, correcting for voters’ geographic dispersion would mostly benefit the city’s center-right constituency. At the same time, the Democratic and Democratic–WFP blocs would end up with seat shares that more accurately reflect their shares of the vote.
Proportional representation might also facilitate new governing coalitions—for example, a stronger right-of-center bloc that could work with establishment Democrats to advance legislation aligned with the city’s non-socialist majority. A council less tied to single-member districts might also be less prone to blocking housing projects at the request of the member whose district is affected.
Adding seats to what is already the nation’s largest city council might appear like a wasteful tradeoff. But a larger assembly would facilitate closer proportionality while also giving citywide interests a stronger voice. Under mixed-member proportional representation, the 20 party-level seats would allow parties to send representatives whose mandate reflects citywide support rather than the priorities of any one neighborhood. That would likely mean more members focused on broader ideological and policy questions.
Using the council’s current budget as a benchmark, adding 20 seats would cost about $46 million. As a point of comparison, when early voting was first implemented in 2019, Mayor Bill de Blasio offered the Board of Elections $75 million to open 100 early polling sites.
Mayor Mamdani’s new charter commission is supposed to modernize city government and restore public confidence. One way to advance that goal is to give voters an electoral system that lets the city council more fully reflect the views of the city it represents.