Has the time passed for ranked-choice voting in SCC?
Next Tuesday, the County Board of Supes will discuss a potential shift to ranked-choice voting (previously rejected by SJ City Council) in county elections. But The Hill wonders, below, if the history of havoc, obfuscations, and voter frustration in counties that have attempted RCV compels us to leave it in the past.
Countless cities and counties that misguidedly implemented [ranked-choice voting] are dumping it like a bad stock — either of their own accord or because of citizen-led petitions.
Ranked-choice voting is a confusing and convoluted method of voting that tries to force voters to rank multiple candidates for a single office. If one candidate secures a majority in the first round, that candidate wins. Otherwise, lower-ranked candidates’ votes are redistributed or thrown out until a winner emerges.
This system has resulted in thousands of discarded ballots, widespread voting errors, delayed election results, longer lines at polling places, suspect recounts and, consequently, diminished voter confidence.
We know that public trust in elections matters. This is why six states — Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Idaho, Kentucky and Montana — have banned ranked-choice voting over the last two years.
Ranked-choice is approved at the statewide level only in Maine and Alaska. …
A statewide repeal effort of ranked-choice is underway in Alaska [Editor's note: This repeal was narrowly defeated at the ballot box in November 2024]. …
Alaskans’ reasons for rejecting ranked choice voting are numerous. To start, 11 percent of the ballots in Alaska in 2022 were “spoiled” due to voter confusion under ranked-choice — more than three times the normal rate. During the state’s special at-large congressional election, nearly 15,000 Alaskans had their ballots thrown out. This included more than 11,000 tossed because voters selected only one candidate without ranking any others. When that candidate was eliminated, their votes were eliminated as well.
To avoid this, ranked-choice tries to force voters to “vote against their conscience, or even vote for their opponent, to ensure that their ballot does not end up in a landfill.” To put it another way, ranked-choice manufactures phony majorities by coercing voters into ranking candidates they do not actually support. …
This confusion and havoc created by ranked-choice is not confined to Alaska. In Alameda, Calif., election researchers discovered a programming glitch that caused misallocation of ranked-choice votes. The ranked-choice system was so complex that none of the election officials or candidates even noticed.
After a recount, officials found that they had in fact certified the wrong winner of an Oakland school board race. That candidate actually took office before the error was caught, and the rightful winner did not replace him until four months later.
Read the whole thing here.
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