Five days into early voting, Mayor Eric Adams is stopping short of encouraging voters to take full advantage of the city’s ranked-choice voting system in deciding primary races for City Council.

“I think voters should determine if they want to rank or if they don't want to,” Adams told reporters on Wednesday. “It's up to the voters.”

The mayor’s reticence on the relatively new voting procedure is not new — he’s had longstanding criticisms about the process, which allows voters to rank candidates by preference. But ranked-choice voting experts and advocates say by not ranking, voters are blunting the impact of their ballots.

“Ranking candidates increases the chance a voter will have a say in the final result, so we encourage everyone to carefully consider each candidate on their ballot and rank the candidates they feel deserve their support,” said Betsy Gotbaum, the executive director of Citizens Union, a good-government group that has sought to educate voters on the process.

The ranked choice system incentivizes voters to have a backup, allowing them to select as many as five candidates in order of preference.

Only voters who rank more than one candidate will maximize their chances of having an impact on the election. Under the system, if no candidate wins more than 50% of the vote, the winner is determined by elimination rounds that take ranked choices into account.

Ranking more than one candidate does not hurt a voter’s first choice.

Ranked choice ballots were introduced citywide for the first time in the 2021 mayoral primary after voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of implementing it. Proponents have argued that the system would force candidates to appeal to a broader swath of voters, eliminate costly runoff elections, and encourage a larger, more diverse pool of candidates.

City voters appeared to get the hang of the new system. In the 2021 mayoral primary, only 13% of voters elected to choose one candidate.

But Adams has been skeptical of the system, warning that it could disenfranchise minority voters who may not have received enough public education on how ranked-choice voting works.

He recently urged voters not to rank more than one candidate in a Harlem council race, where he has endorsed Assemblymember Inez Dickens over Assemblymember Al Taylor and Yusef Salaam, one of five men wrongly convicted and imprisoned for raping a woman in Central Park in 1989.

During the 2021 primary, Adams described a last-minute alliance between Andrew Yang and Kathryn Garcia as a “backroom deal” and said it was meant to prevent the election of a mayor of color, although Yang is Asian-American.

Less than halfway into his second term, Adams appears to be bracing for a possible primary challenge. Criticism of the mayor is mounting amid the sudden departure of NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell and the questionable handling of multiple crises — including the arrival of tens of thousands of migrants, growing concern over the safety of detainees on Rikers Island, an air quality emergency brought on by Canadian wildfires.

During a Father’s Day speech he delivered on Sunday, the mayor said there was a coordinated effort to prevent him from winning a second term.

Asked about those comments on Wednesday, Adams attributed those motivations to racism.

“There's a body of people who were pleased with 30 years without having a mayor that looked like me,” he said. “To some in this city, I don't fit the mold of what a mayor should be in the largest big city in America.”