SFGATE politics reporter Alec Regimbal has compiled a guide to ranked-choice voting for anyone confused about how it works
by Alec Regimbal
Though San Francisco has used ranked-choice voting for local elections for 20 years, this method of picking more than one candidate when marking your ballot can be confusing for first-time voters. Even regular voters may not understand everything about it.
If that’s the case, don’t worry. We’re here to help.
In 2004, San Francisco instituted ranked-choice voting for several city political offices, including the mayor, district attorney, sheriff and members of the Board of Supervisors. Rather than checking one box, you rank multiple candidates in order of preference. In San Francisco, you can rank up to 10 candidates in each race.
So, how do you fill out your ballot? Let’s get into it.
How ranked-choice voting works
The city’s website has a helpful demo tool that voters can use to see how marking a ranked-choice ballot works. But if you’d rather skip that, here’s what you need to know.
The first thing you should decide is which candidate, or candidates, you want to see win their respective races.
On your ballot, each ranked-choice race is divided into columns. In the first column, you fill in the bubble next to the candidate you most want to see win that race.
If you have a second choice in that race, you fill in the bubble next to that candidate’s name in the second column. If you have third-, fourth- or even fifth-choice candidates, you fill in the bubble next to each candidate’s name in the column that corresponds with your preference.
You can rank as many, or as few, candidates as you want for each race (remember, 10 is the max in San Francisco even if a race has more than 10 candidates). If you only like one person, you can mark only their bubble.
On election night, poll workers will tally all first-choice votes for each race. If any candidate in a race wins a majority of first-choice votes (50% plus one vote), that candidate wins that race, and counting for that race stops.
Here’s where it gets tricky. If no candidate gets a majority of first-choice votes, then the candidate that received the fewest first-choice votes will be eliminated. Now, poll workers will look at all of the ballots that ranked the eliminated candidate first to see who those voters ranked second.
Those voters’ second-choice candidates now become their first-choice candidates, since their actual first-choice candidate was eliminated. Poll workers will then redistribute all of their votes to the remaining candidates.
If that redistribution process results in any candidate receiving a majority first-choice votes, then that candidate wins and counting stops. If not, then this process repeats through as many rounds as necessary until one candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes and is declared the winner.
Let’s look at an example.
Ranked-choice voting at work
Let’s pretend that Rabbit, Duck, Pig and Goat are running for a local office in San Francisco.
Here are the initial results on election night: Duck won 35% of first-choice votes, Pig won 30%, Goat won 20% and Rabbit won 15%. No candidate won a majority of first-choice votes, so the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes — in this case, Rabbit — is eliminated. (Sorry, Rabbit, better luck next time.)
Poll workers now look at all the ballots that ranked Rabbit first to see whom those voters ranked second. Then, those votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates.
Here are the results after the second round of counting: Duck has 40% of first-choice votes, Pig has 35% and Goat has 25%. Still, no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes, so now Goat is eliminated. (Goodbye, Goat.)
Let’s say most people who ranked Goat first ranked Pig second, and, because of that, Pig overtakes Duck in the third round. The new totals: Pig won 55% of first-choice votes, and Duck won 45%. Because Pig now has a majority of first-choice votes, Pig wins the race and counting is over.
This example demonstrates an important point about ranked-choice voting: You can’t always expect the leading candidate to maintain that lead as ballots are counted in later rounds. Sometimes the leading candidate in the first round goes on to win, but just as often, they don’t.
Why does San Francisco use ranked-choice voting?
Though it is a more complicated way to vote, ranked-choice voting is becoming more popular.
In the Bay Area, it’s used in a few other cities, including Berkeley and Oakland. Across the country, the system is used in 62 jurisdictions as of 2022, according to the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center. Notable examples include New York City and Minneapolis, and in statewide elections in Alaska and statewide primaries in Maine.
Ranked-choice voting eliminates the need for a separate runoff election later, since a winner from that initial vote is eventually named. Runoff elections cost money, ranked-choice proponents say, and they typically attract lower voter turnout.
On a more theoretical level, proponents say the system is more democratic in that it usually leads to the candidate with the most widespread support winning office. It also reduces the chance of what’s called the “spoiler effect,” a phenomenon that typically occurs when a third-party or longshot candidate pulls enough votes from the mainstream candidates that it alters the results of an election.
It can also do away with vote splitting. For example, Steve Garvey, the Republican candidate for California’s U.S. Senate seat, will likely lose his race against California Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat. In the state’s March primary, California Reps. Katie Porter and Barabra Lee, both progressive Democrats, were knocked out of the race after Schiff and Garvey secured the most votes in the primary.
Proponents would probably argue that the electon’s results were undemocratic. The three Democrats in the race split the Democratic votes among themselves, which allowed a Republican to cruise to the general election in a state where Democratic voters outnumber Republican voters 2 to 1.
Are there downsides to ranked-choice voting?
Critics of ranked-choice argue that the results can take several days to be finalized and that such elections are costly, complicated and actually less democratic because they eschew the classic idea of one person, one vote. They say it also encourages what’s called “horse-trading,” when two or more candidates form alliances and encourage voters to rank them in a certain order. Still another contention is that the system doesn’t necessarily reflect the true will of the voters because they’re not forced to rank a specific number of candidates, as voters in Australian Parliamentary elections are.
And as mentioned earlier, ranked-choice voting also can lead to unexpected outcomes where candidates come from behind to beat opponents who had the most votes early on. It’s a major gripe both among the system’s critics and the supporters of those initial front-runners. In Oakland, we’ve seen two examples in the past 15 years of candidates who edged out narrow victories in a ranked-choice elections.
In the 2010 mayoral election, former California state Sen. Don Perata jumped out to a huge lead after the first round, earning nearly 34% of first-choice votes. However, Jean Quan, who at that time was a member of the Oakland City Council, was able to make up enough ground in the next nine rounds that she eventually won the race by a tiny margin: 50.96% to 49.04%. In the first round, Quan won just 24% of first-choice votes. She would lose reelection four years later.
More recently, in the city’s 2022 mayoral election, Sheng Thao edged out Loren Taylor — who, at that time, was a colleague of Thao’s on the Oakland City Council — by an even slimmer margin: 50.3% to 49.7%. That election was settled in nine rounds of voting, and Taylor led Thao in every round except the final two. Thao is currently the subject of a recall election that will be on the Nov. 5 ballot.
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