Alliance of South Asian American Labor (ASAAL) Endorses Ranked-choice Voting

UsaNewsOnline.Com, New York : The Alliance of South Asian American Labor (ASAAL) candidate screening committee met on Saturday, December 26, 2020 virtually. The screening committee met to interview the candidates who are running in the Special Election for the 24^th City Council District to be held  on February 2, 2021 vacated by Rory Lancman. We interviewed the following best seven candidates listed below in order of appearance: Dr. Neeta Jain, Moumita Ahmed, Deepti Sharma, James F. Gennaro, Soma Sayed, Esq., Mujibur Rahman, and Dr. Dilip Nath.

The committee was impressed by the presentations made by these candidates. Their knowledge of the special election where there is no political party affiliation and the difficulty of winning such an election  was very much apparent. They all eloquently spoke about their own base and ability to fund raise giving assurance that they will all max-out the matching funds. The committee is proud of all the candidates who appeared, especially the South Asian candidates, for their preparedness for such a race. Above all the candidates’ understanding  of the issues, problems, and struggles faced by the community is what the committee liked the most.

During the twenty five minute individual interview, when  each candidate was asked separately, all the candidates spoke highly about ranked-choice voting and how it will diversify the election process. Candidates believe this will help minority candidates to have their representation and participation increased in City politics. They believe that due to ranked voting every city council district that is open to an election in 2021 will have scores of candidates running for each of those 41 seats, (36 open and 5 special), of 51 total seats! In fact ranked voting has opened the door for minorities and new communities across the city.

You may recall when ranked voting was proposed in the November 5, 2019 general elections, ASAAL supported vehemently and requested our member voters to vote  and asked others to vote for such a monumental proposal and the proposal won with over 74% of the votes cast, giving a profound victory to ASAAL.

Ranked-choice voting is now in effect for the New York City election for mayor, city council and other offices in 2021. Under the system, voters will rank up to five candidates in order of preference, instead of casting a ballot for just one! If no candidate gets a majority of the vote, the last place candidate is eliminated and their votes are parceled out to the voter’s second choice, a computerized process that continues until one candidate has a majority and is declared the winner.

After intense consideration of all the facets of this new process, clearly the candidates and the choice of their respective voting base indicate that none of them can win with a majority without getting votes from the other candidates’ base. It also implies if ASAAL is only to endorse the best candidate then the other candidates will be out of the competition. In the process the very intention of ranked-choice voting will be defeated.

Therefore to promote ranked-choice voting, a concept unknown to many voters in our community, ASAAL is endorsing ranked-choice voting with the belief that it will help South Asian candidates  the most. So ASAAL is requesting all its members to educate and promulgate our communities to use ranked-choice voting by putting their candidates of choice first and rank the others accordingly. We thank all the candidates for joining us at our screening committee and wish them the very best in this special election and beyond.