Ranked Choice
Voting does nothing
to improve local elections
By Matthew Fleming | November 5, 2024
A recent social media post by a San Francisco mayoral candidate announcing his political strategy for the city’s ranked-choice voting inadvertently highlights why ranked-choice voting is silly.
Approved by San Francisco voters in 2002, RCV was billed as a good-government reform that would save the city money, boost voter turnout, reduce negative campaigning and lead to consensus candidates, none of which has proven to be true, except for maybe the cost savings, which are nominal at best.
RCV allows voters to select, or rank, more than one candidate in order of preference. This allows the city to avoid a runoff election in instances where no candidate gets a majority by eliminating the lowest performing candidate each round and redistributing votes by voter preference until someone gets a majority.
Confused? It’s not as complicated as it is unnecessary, which the 645-word post on X by former San Francisco Supervisor Mark Farrell makes painfully clear.
First, Farrell urges voters to “leave (Mayor) London Breed and (Supervisor) Aaron Peskin off of their ballots entirely,” which would be a waste of breath (or pixels) under a normal voting scheme because voters would simply vote for the candidate they like best.
Does RCV deliver on its promises?
Disproving that RCV makes elections less negative, Farrell goes on to trash:
- Political consultants, who he writes have turned “the mayor’s race into a cynical game of musical chairs – more focused on polls and power than on what’s best for our city.”
- Breed and Peskin, who “have overseen the sharpest decline San Francisco has faced in modern history. And yet, they are selling more of the same. They’ve had more than six years to fix this, and they’ve failed.”
- Fellow candidate Daniel Lurie, who is “relentlessly attacking me with his inherited wealth” and “his failure of character.”
Farrell also announces that he’s formed an “alliance with Ahsha Safai” because they “both believe London Breed should not be mayor.” He makes his case for himself, but also why Safai should be voters’ second choice, not Breed, Peskin or Lurie.
It’s just so many words about strategy that drives home why one voter, one vote is such a straightforward way to settle elections.
The tediousness of RCV and its lack of focus are likely big reasons it hasn’t led to any meaningful boost in voter turnout. It’s asking a lot of low-propensity voters to suffer through an op-ed-sized social media post that’s part campaign literature and part strategy memo. And voter enthusiasm is not likely to be boosted by a scheme that could help elect your second- or third- or ninth-choice candidate.
And while this might save the city around $2 million for the cost of periodic runoff elections, that amount represents around 0.001% of the city’s annual budget – not exactly a victory for fiscal responsibility and government efficiency.
But any perceived gains in voter turnout, cost savings and positive campaigning, which are nominal at best, are all insignificant compared to the possibility of disappointing results.
RCV goes awry in Alaska
Alaska’s RCV elections perhaps make this case best. Republican voters in the Last Frontier outnumber Democrats nearly two to one. Despite this significant advantage, Alaska’s 2022 House race, the first time RCV was used in the state, sent a Democrat to Washington, D.C.
On both first rounds (for a special election and then a general election later that year), Republican candidates took the majority, only to lose in subsequent elections. It’s entirely possible that this was ultimately the will of the voters and the results of the upcoming election will support whether this is what voters intended or not.
Not for nothing, Alaskans will also get to decide whether to repeal RCV this election as well.
The 2022 Oakland Mayoral Election also led to bizarre results. For seven rounds, Councilmember Loren Taylor won a plurality, only to lose the election in the ninth round to then-fellow Councilmember Sheng Thao. Thao’s brief tenure has been filled with controversy, including an FBI raid of her home earlier this year. She is also facing a recall in November.
Results yield few surprises
There’s certainly no shortage of drama and surprises in a traditional, one-voter, one-vote election; RCV has no monopoly on weird results.
And despite occasional surprising results, RCV winners in San Francisco are usually the person consistently leading in voting rounds. The last surprise was a 2020 supervisorial election, when the initial third-choice candidate won in the third round.
But it does call into question why this is necessary in the first place. RCV in San Francisco has not delivered in any meaningful way on its promises to improve turnout, save money and produce higher-minded elections.
Instead, it has simply brought into existence a tedious and unnecessarily complicated voting scheme.
Matthew Fleming is director of communications for the Pacific Research Institute.
