San Leandro Mayor Tony Santos was a big booster of ranked-choice voting, the controversial new system for conducting local elections in California.
But after losing re-election by 232 votes in the sixth round of a computerized instant runoff, Santos says he realized, too late, that ranked-choice has all sorts of problems.
city photoMayor Tony Santos
“The pure fact is, RCV is misunderstood by many voters,” he wrote in a recent e-mail, using the acronym by which the new system is known.
“And it discriminates against minorities and individuals who have a problem with language, and further, with the number of spoiled ballots, it reflects confusion among many voters, enough to (skew) elections.”
Santos says he has such deep misgivings about the system he once championed that he has refused to concede last month’s election to mayor-elect Stephen Cassidy. Santos received the most first-place votes but lost because more voters picked Cassidy as their second or third choices.
Instead, Santos says he’s going to devote his retirement to “working nationally to stop RCV elections nationally."
"This is now my goal,” as he put it.
“The only thing I could suggest is, ranked-choice voting is not the way to go,” Santos said in an interview. “My race should be the poster child against this system.”
Santos’ is the latest local complaint to be registered about ranked choice, a system that was first used in a California election in San Francisco in 2004.
This November, three Alameda County cities – Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro, at Santos' urging – used it for the first time. Other California cities are considering the new system for their elections, attracted in part by the promise of cost savings: With ranked choice, there’s no need to hold a second runoff election when no candidate gets a majority of the votes.
But this year some voters – including even San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor-elect – complained they found the system so confusing they didn’t fill out their ballots properly.
In Oakland, former state Senate leader Don Perata, loser to council member Jean Quan, said he couldn't figure the system out.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s John Diaz detailed other complaints in a recent op-ed; as he noted, Perata, Santos, and two candidates for San Francisco's board of supervisors, Janet Reilly and Tony Kelly, were declared losers even though they got the most first-place votes.
Ranked-choice advocates have downplayed concerns, saying that the new system is legal, fair and not really very confusing at all. Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonprofit which advocates for ranked-choice voting, said after the Oakland mayoral election:
Under the old, two round runoff system there would have been five months of mostly negative mudslinging and a much bigger impact from big campaign spending. But with RCV, Oakland was able to finish in a single, high turnout November election, thereby saving a lot of tax dollars and allowing voters and candidates to participate in a robust electoral process. However the final mayoral results turn out, this has been a win-win for democracy in Oakland.
For his part, Santos says he worries that ranked-choice by its very nature disenfranchises some voters. As the rounds of computerized runoffs proceed, more and more ballots are “exhausted” – set aside – because all the candidates for whom voters cast ranked votes have been eliminated.
In his race, he says that more than 2,100 votes had been exhausted by the finale.
“Wait a minute,” he says. “People who vote in elections want their votes to be counted.”
Santos’ second thoughts have frayed relations with his former friends in the ranked-choice movement.
Steven Hill, a co-founder of FairVote, wrote Santos an impassioned e-mail last month trying to dissuade him from going public with his misgivings.
Calling the mayor “a model civil servant for the people of San Leandro,” Hill said Santos became his “personal hero” when he lobbied for the new voting system.
“People will one day probably name a street or building or more after you,” Hill told Santos. But Santos' complaints risked "tarnishing" his "beautiful legacy there in SL," he warned.
“It looks like you are being a sore loser and vindictive besides,” Hill wrote. “One of the best things that any politician can do for their legacy … is that when you lose re-election you go ‘gracefully into that good night.’”
Hill also told Santos: “What I would love to do is give you a great hug, because I feel such a warm brotherly feeling toward you, like two soldiers of democracy that fought in the trenches together.”
Santos doesn’t appear to be interested in a graceful exit or a hug.
Last week FairVote executive director Richie e-mailed the mayor a fact sheet about the San Leandro election. It defended the ranked-choice system’s performance and asserted, “Stephen Cassidy was the clear choice of San Leandro voters.”
“BULLCRAP!” Santos e-mailed back, using capital letters for emphasis. “RCV SHOULD BE SCRAPPED ASAP.”
Comments
They stated 27% of Asian Americans found RCV difficult and 35% of blacks found it difficult. Only 13% of whites found RCV difficult.
Hill and Richie wrote the results "shows postive views"??
It is unfortunate that Williams is perpetuating the myth that leading with first choice votes is justification for winning the election. That is especially true in this case, where Santos led in the first round with just 35.5% of the votes and Cassidy was less than 1/3 of a percent behind. Under RCV, leading in the first round is about as relevant as leading with 10% of the precincts reporting.
The flaws of plurality voting and vote splitting are so big and the consequences of subjecting our political system to them are so adverse, that it is regrettable that there are people like Williams still advocating for them.
This was a close race, close from beginning to end. It is not indicative of good leadership that of all the factors that could have readily made a difference in the outcome, like his own performance, Santos is fixating on the criticism of RCV. Those alleged flaws would have at most had minor effects on the final vote counts and probably wouldn't change the winner.
The few, mostly misguided objections Santos now has with RCV fall far short of the "many myriad problems" he said he suddenly discovered once results were reported. To the extent those problems do exist, they are fixable and do not justify scrapping RCV. The constructive efforts Santos could have made to further improve San Leandro elections will be missed.
"But no one here is complaining about the fact that 2nd and 3rd place votes made Santos lose, as another commenter claims."
Santos maybe isn't, but it is a misconception that Williams is promoting. You do remember that it was one of the key complaints from the Perata camp? And it is a phenomenon that Williams juxtaposes with Santos. Likewise with Reilly and Kelly.
"If a regular election was won by 100 votes and 500 write-in ballots were never looked at, people would rightfully be screaming. Santos is saying this is that kind of case."
Actually no. Santos didn't say that. Besides, your analogy is badly flawed, if you are implying the write-in ballots were valid votes. Not having your vote counted because of error by election officials is different that not having your vote counted because of voter error. And that is different than wishing after the fact if only the rules had been different.
No one is suggesting election officials failed to count the ballots according to the rules. Santos is doing some wishing after the fact and he is complaining about voter confusion.
Voter confusion is something that can be decreased with continuing voter education. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water. Voter confusion about how to mark RCV ballots was small, especially compared to voter confusion about how the candidates would actually perform in office. Unfortunately, Santos, Williams, and others are intent on confusing voters even more.
Santos is being reckless when he implies that having your vote be exhausted is not having it counted and that it disenfranchises voters, and that there were more than 2100 voters who were somehow forced out of the election. That is Santos' own version of "BULLCRAP!". It is a shame that people are encouraging him to go national with it.
It would have been better if voters had had the option to rank all of the candidates. But they didn't. Santos knew that when he voted for RCV. Complaining about it now just makes him look incompetent. Hopefully voters will have that option sometime in the future. The limitation is imposed by the voting system, not by RCV. As more jurisdictions adopt RCV, more voting systems will support it better. But until then, RCV is still doing a better job than anything San Leandro has ever had.
As long as Williams keeps presenting Perata's and Newsom's feigned confusion as genuine rather than the political theater it obviously is, Williams is just destroying his own reputation as a journalist.
. So a 20x increase in bad ballots should be disturbing.
. How does one justify the >3% over vote rate in San Francisco's most impoverished district, when normal over votes are 0.01%??
understand there are many people not as smart and engaged as you are.
"... in traditional elections, 99.99% of voters cast ballots without errors."
I'm calling you out on that one Demo123. Back that claim up with referenced, verifiable stats. Make sure you're comparing apples to apples, in this case hand marked ballots, not DRE ballots. It is also best to distinguish precinct scanned ballots versus vote-by-mail ballots.
"How does one justify the >3% over vote rate in San Francisco's most impoverished district, when normal over votes are 0.01%??
One doesn't justify it. One works to improve it, regardless of the comparison and without throwing out the good that RCV brings to that contest, to that district, and to everywhere else that RCV is used.
And one makes fair comparisons. The above comparison is not an apples-to-apples comparison. A fair comparison would compare the over vote rate in that RCV contest to an over vote rate in plurality contests with 21 candidates plus a write-in that are in districts with similar demographics, and then multiply by three, since RCV allows a voter to give three choices instead of just one. Then you do a valid statistical test to see if any differences are statistically significant.
Let us know when you're ready to make a fair comparison.
I'm not advocating for Santos as a candidate in any way, and I'm certainly not going to get into any argument that involves guessing how people would have voted if they understood the ballot.
This article is about the problems San Leandro voters had using RCV. Let's divide the cast ballots into five categories regarding just the Mayor race:
Having analyzed a number of RCV elections I find that on average about 8-9% of voters make mistakes on their ballots. San Leandro had 9.72% of it's voters make some kind of mistake, although I will say that most of their ballots counted anyway. It is common for at least 0.5% of ballots to not count due to error, which I find troubling because that is in the same order as the typical recount threshold.
The problem with voter education is that doing enough of it can cost just as much as the runoff election that RCV tries to avoid. In my opinion it would be best to have machines like those in San Francisco that fully check ballots when cast, and minimize absentee balloting.
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