The Bay Area shouldn’t let an Alameda County hiccup slow its enthusiasm for ranked-choice voting.
The Alameda County Registrar of Voters said Wednesday that a programming error in the tally system for ranked-choice voting changed the outcome of the District 4 Oakland Unified School Board race. Mike Hutchinson was informed Wednesday that he had defeated Nick Resnick, who previously had been declared the winner.
Ranked-choice voting has being used successfully in two states and 53 cities. A learning curve should be expected when utilizing a new system. It’s important to note that the error impacted only a single race in the four Alameda County cities — Albany, Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro — that use ranked-choice voting.
The beauty of ranked-choice voting is that it strengthens the principle of majority rule and discourages negative campaigning, because candidates need to appeal to a wider range of voters.
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors should make the switch in January when it is expected to consider the issue. Santa Clara County voters approved the systems change when they backed Measure F in 1998, but the county’s voting machines didn’t have the ability to implement the system.
Better yet, the Legislature should initiate an effort to make California the third state to adopt ranked-choice voting statewide.
Ranked-choice voting works like this: Instead of making a choice for just one candidate, voters rank candidates in order of preference. Voters know that if their first choice doesn’t win, their vote automatically counts for their next choice. The candidate with more than half the first-place votes wins. If no candidate has more than 50%, the ballots for the candidate in last place are reallocated to voters’ second choices. The process continues until a candidate secures a majority and is declared the winner.
In the Oakland Unified School Board race, the election reform group Fair Voice discovered some ballots in which voters had not marked a first choice on the ballot but marked ranking of candidates elsewhere on the ballot. Alameda County mistakenly programmed the Dominion voting machines used for the election to simply discard those ballots. But under the rules governing the Berkeley, Oakland and San Leandro races, if no candidate was selected as a first choice, the next choice on the ballot should be counted as the first choice. Any subsequent choices should be moved up, accordingly. When the suspended ballots were properly counted, the only outcome that changed was the Oakland race.
Ranked-choice voting is not complicated. Voters like it because it saves the cost of a primary election while also giving them much greater say in who is elected. Under the current system, a candidate can win with only 20%-30% of the vote, meaning a majority of voters did not choose the winner. Ranked-choice voting diminishes the chances of extremist candidates who appeal to a small slice of voters. It also encourages voters to research every candidate on the ballot.
Those are advantages that every California voter should support.
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