OAKLAND — It is becoming more common across the country for cities, counties, and now even whole states to use ranked-choice voting, an election method that lets people support more than one candidate in the same race.
Still, ranked-choice voting is being criticized in Oakland, which was one of the first places to use it, after mistakes hurt the process in the last election. The public’s feelings about the issue might rest on how well the election on November 5 goes.
Officials in charge of elections say they’ve fixed a computer glitch that caused a ranked-choice school board race to be called wrong in 2022.
But there is still a less well-known problem: this year’s 10-candidate City Council race, which includes Oakland’s former police chief, will only have five choice slots on the ballot, which goes against the rules in the City Charter.
The head of the nonprofit Reclaim Oakland said that it has started “educating voters” about the format with $125,000 raised by a political committee that wants to get rid of ranked-choice voting in future city elections.
The same group, Foundational Oakland Unites, has also spent $480,000 to remove Mayor Sheng Thao. Thao’s narrow win in the 2022 election depended on a special way the system transfers votes between candidates.
The head of Reclaim Oakland, Pamela Ferran, only said that she is “meeting with groups” of mostly older residents and looking into how ranked-choice voting works in other places.
A new-look City Council will decide next year whether to put ranked-choice on the ballot, so it won’t be officially up for debate until then. Could this year’s format take any hits?
How ranked-choice voting works
The main idea behind ranked-choice voting is pretty easy to understand, but the more complicated parts of the system take longer to explain.
When there are more than two candidates, voters mark a bubble next to each candidate’s name in the right column and list the ones they support in order of choice. People who are voting only need to think about that.
After all the votes are tallied, the winner of the race is the person who gets more than half of the first-place votes.
If none of them do, the election goes into a “instant runoff,” where the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their votes are given to other candidates based on what their supporters’ second picks were.
If there are more than three candidates and no one has more than 50% support, the race goes to a second round of elimination. Another change is that a candidate marked in the third-choice boxes could get votes if the first two candidates are thrown out.
Not until a candidate gets the most votes does the round come to an end. If you look at the 2022 mayoral election, there were ten candidates. It took nine rounds to narrow the field to eight because Thao and Loren Taylor were so close.
After Jean Quan in 2010, Thao was the second mayor of Oakland to win an election without getting most of the first-place votes. Instead, she did it by getting second-choice votes from a more left-leaning candidate.
People who like ranked-choice voting say it smartly brings out the details of voter preferences and makes candidates who don’t have a good chance of winning more important.
People who don’t like ranked-choice say that it’s hard to understand and that its difficulties have helped cause some recent disasters.
How Oakland school board’s ranked-choice debacle will impact Nov. 5 election
Several people left the first-choice column blank in the 2022 Oakland Unified district school board race, even though Mike Hutchinson was the clear winner. He was marked as the second choice. According to Oakland’s city code, those votes should have been sent to him right away. If they were, he would have won.
But instead, the Alameda County Registrar of Voters, who runs the city’s elections, chose the wrong setting in the ranked-choice system and ignored those votes until the second round of elimination, which was too late for Hutchinson as she had already been eliminated.
In the end, a judge fixed the problem, but not before certifying and introducing the wrong winner.
This time, the well-known elections company Dominion Voting Systems isn’t letting election workers pick between settings. In an interview, Registrar Tim Dupuis said that the company’s software could be much easier to use in the future.
A small change like this could completely change the result of an election, though. This seems to be a flaw in the ranked choice system. And there isn’t much study or discussion about which of those settings better shows what voters want, which is the whole point.
People who don’t like ranked-choice often just call it “confusing,” maybe because that word sounds so bad.
As Steve Hill of the ranked-choice advocacy group Fair Vote put it, “everyone wants these things to be simple, but democracy is not simple.” He said that the rules about campaign finance, the electoral college, and the one-two primary system are all very complicated.
Larger races will still be limited to five ranked-choice columns
In Oakland’s most recent mayoral election, there were ten candidates, but ballots could only have five choice columns for all local races. This was against the rules set by the City Charter, which says that voters should be able to “rank as many choices as there are candidates.”
In the upcoming 10 candidate race for the City Council’s at-large seat and 6 candidate race for District 3, voters will only be able to rank candidates across five choice slots. This problem will not go away.
Election officials are depending on a clause in the City Charter that lets them break the rules if the voting machines “feasibly candidate” all those options.
There are a total of 10 choice slots in Dominion. That’s how many will be on the ballots for San Francisco’s important 13-candidate mayoral race.
On the other hand, Alameda County officials decided that 8.5 x 11-inch paper ballots are too small to hold more than five choice columns per race, and it would be too expensive for the other towns in the county to make changes just for Oakland.
The problem with logistics will have a big effect on how the votes are run. It’s not clear how it affects poll results, but in Oakland, officials hope the results can stand up to scrutiny.