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The Votes Are IN For The Greatest Fictional Mayor of NYC
By
Jacob Dobkin
and
Jen Carlson
Published Feb 18, 2021
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Ghostbusters
By
Jacob Dobkin
and
Jen Carlson
Published Feb 18, 2021
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Earlier this week we went to the polls to vote for our favorite fictional mayor of New York City. But at this election, we didn't have to choose just one mayoral candidate, we could choose several. And that's how it will be when we vote a real mayor into office later this year, as the city embarks on a new era of ranked-choice voting. Now that you've ranked the fictional mayors, we're going to break down how the winner was declared through the ranked-choice voting process.
The contenders came from such films and TV shows as City Hall, The Taking of Pelham 123, Sweet Home Alabama, Ghostbusters, Futurama, Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, and The Dark Knight.
Your winner: Mayor Lenny of Ghostbusters. Let's walk through the results of our election.
A ranked-choice vote proceeds round by round, with the lowest ranked candidate eliminated, and their votes redistributed to more popular candidates. In round one, the candidates are ranked by the number of first choice votes: Mayor Lenny from Ghostbusters is the clear favorite with 401 out of 1260 votes cast, perhaps due to the iconic status of that movie and his role in it of preventing the destruction of the city, but he has nowhere close to enough votes to get the 50% margin needed outright, so we move to round 2.
In this case, the first candidate to be eliminated is Bruce Lincoln, the mayor portrayed by Charles S. Dutton in Aftershock: Earthquake in New York. This is not surprising — the movie has a dismal 35% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it's likely very few of our voters saw it. Mayor Lincoln's 50 votes were redistributed, with 14 votes going to Mayor Lenny, and smaller numbers to the other remaining five candidates.
You can see this play out in the interactive bar graph below, by clicking between round 1 and round 2:
The process continues: In round 3, we see Mayor Anthony Garcia, portrayed by Nestor Carbonell in the Dark Knight movies, get the axe. These were very popular movies, so it's likely that his unpopularity stems from the chaos that reigned in Gotham City during his tenure, with repeated attacks by supervillains such as the Joker, Two-Face, and Bane.
His 137 votes were redistributed to the remaining four candidates, once again with Mayor Lenny taking the most, with 44 — but here we also see strength in two other candidates: The Mayor, played by James Gandolfini in The Taking of Pelham 123, perhaps justly credited for his success in resolving a hostage situation on the subway, or for the local popularity of the actor who portrayed him in such hits as The Sopranos. The animated Mayor C. Randall Poopenmeyer also received a fair number of votes — perhaps due to his amusing name, or his success saving New New York City from "the garbage ball crisis of 3000" on Futurama.
For the final rounds, let's bring in another diagram, called a Sankey chart, to help us make sense of the flow of votes between the candidates. Read it from left to right, and top to bottom- in each round, the votes from from an eliminated candidate "flow" upwards as they are redistributed:
In round 4, Mayor Kate Hennings (played by Candice Bergen) of Sweet Home Alabama is eliminated, with her 157 votes redistributed. This may be the result of her unlikeable character in the movie, which hewed conservative in our presently overwhelmingly Democratic city.
In round 5, it's John Pappas who loses out, the character portrayed by Al Pacino in City Hall — his 198 votes go to the last three candidates, and in this case it's The Mayor (Gandolfini) who gains the most, suggesting that the Pappas voters were looking for an alternative to Mayor Lenny, the frontrunner. At this point, all the remaining candidates have shown real popularity, though Mayor Lenny continues to lead with 543 votes, or 46.1%, quite close to the 50% cutoff for winning.
For the last round let's look at table of results: scroll to the right to see the final results column.
In round 6, Mayor C. Randall Poopenmeyer is eliminated, perhaps because as an animated character he didn't draw as much support from the human voters as his competitors. This leaves us with just two candidates, and with the redistributed Poopenmeyer votes, Mayor Lenny now has enough to claim a 59.1% share, handily beating The Mayor (Gandolfini) who had 40.9%. While Mayor Lenny was in the lead from the beginning, this result demonstrates he has true majority support, which is one of the benefits of ranked choice voting.
Did this election turn out the way you expected? Were the visualizations helpful in making sense of how a ranked choice vote works? Is it the most controversial Gothamist election since the bitterly-contested Brooklyn Bridge Park movie night vote in 2013? Let us know in the comments!
Special thanks to Armin Samii and his Ranked Choice Voting Visualizations project, for his help on the charts in this post.
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Tagged
ranked choice voting
election 2021
Jacob Dobkin
Jake Dobkin co-founded Gothamist with Jen Chung. In 2019, Jake released Ask a Native New Yorker, a book based on his Gothamist advice column.
Read more
Jen Carlson
Jen Carlson is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
Read more
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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