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Alameda County Registrar of Voters videoThis mock ballot was created to demonstrate ranked-choice voting.
There’s nothing like losing a ranked-choice voting election to sour a politician on this new system for conducting local elections in California.
That’s certainly true of former state Senate leader Don Perata, who claims he easily would have been elected mayor of Oakland in a conventional election. Instead, he was blindsided by councilmember Jean Quan, who swept to victory on the surge of anybody-but-Perata votes cast as second or third choices for the instant runoff.
Then there’s San Francisco businessman Ron Dudum, who in 2006 lost a close ranked-choice race for the Board of Supervisors.
It turned out that the winner, Ed Jew, didn’t even live in San Francisco, as required by law. Six months after the election, the FBI raided Jew’s City Hall office. Jew later pleaded guilty to extorting money from constituents and perjury. He’s serving five years in prison.
“My experience with ranked-choice voting convinced me that it is a terrible way to award an election,” Dudum said in a recent interview.
Jew’s victory highlights one of the system’s problems, Dudum says: In a crowded field with no runoff, voters never really got the chance to focus on questions about Jew’s character, or even his place of residence.
And so, “I lost to a guy who’s now in prison,” Dudum said.
Two year later, when the powerhouse California political law firm of Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor was putting together a legal challenge to ranked-choice voting, Dudum stepped up as lead plaintiff.
His lawsuit targets a technical aspect of the new voting system – in San Francisco, as in Oakland, voters get only three ranked choices, no matter how many candidates are competing for an office. (In one San Francisco supervisors’ race in November there were 21 candidates.)
Dudum argues that the San Francisco system disenfranchises some voters, because in the instant runoff process their votes are “exhausted” – no longer counted – after their candidates have been eliminated.
At trial, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera successfully defended the new system; U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg ruled that San Francisco’s system didn’t violate citizens’ voting rights and passes constitutional muster. The case is now on appeal.
As part of its defense, the city said that one remedy proposed by Dudum – a ballot that gives voters as many ranked choices as there are candidates in a race – was technically cumbersome.
It also might confuse voters, the city said.
The issue of voter confusion is touchy for advocates of the new system. On Nov. 8, I posted data showing that as many as 10 percent of Oakland voters didn’t fill out their ballots as instructed or just skipped voting for mayor entirely.
Voters were showing “signs of confusion,” I wrote, and said that might have affected the election’s outcome.
Ranked-choice voting advocates, including Rob Richie, executive director of FairVote, a nonprofit that promotes the new system, and Fairvote co-founder Steven Hill strongly dissented, essentially denying that voter confusion was a factor in Oakland. Their critique – much of it was posted in the comments section on the original post – was energetic.
In an e-mail that he cc’d to my editors, Hill called the post “a real hack job,” “sloppy,” “the worst sort of sensationalist media reporting” and “shocking.” Richie called the piece “hack journalism” and said he was forwarding his e-mail complaints to the Irvine Foundation and California Common Cause.
And yet the issue of voter confusion still flares.
In a post-election interview, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, the incoming lieutenant governor, told his hometown paper that he was among city voters who had been confused by ranked-choice voting. Newsom said he filled out his own ballot incorrectly, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Meanwhile, Oakland election data shows that vote-by-mail voters were far more likely to make mistakes in the mayor’s contest than voters who cast ballots at the polls.
The data, provided by an analyst who asked not to be quoted by name, focused on “overvotes,” when voters mistakenly try to vote for two or more candidates in any one ranking.
The data look like this:
|
POLL PLACE VOTING |
VOTE BY MAIL |
|||
|
Total Voters |
38,890 |
|
73,211 |
|
|
First Round Overvotes |
30 |
0.08% |
293 |
0.40% |
|
Total Overvotes |
99 |
0.25% |
858 |
1.17% |
Why the disparity?
Perhaps the mistake rate was lower at the polls because the registrar hired poll workers specifically to answer voters’ questions about ranked-choice voting.
Also, if you messed up your ballot at the polls, a scanner would catch it, and poll workers would give you a new ballot.
None of that assistance was available to mail voters – who represented 60 percent of the Oakland electorate.
They filled out their ballots as best they could.
In their confusion they made more mistakes, the argument goes.
San Leandro also had its first ranked-choice voting election, using the system to choose a mayor. Incumbent Mayor Tony Santos, who had been a booster of the new system, wound up losing to former school board member Stephen Cassidy. Now Santos thinks the new system is a bad idea, he wrote in an e-mail addressed to FairVote.
“I am sorry I supported Ranked Choice Voting,” he wrote in the e-mail, which was obtained by California Watch. “I was the individual who carried the matter through our City Council. (Ranked-choice voting) sounded good, but now I can see the many myriad problems Ranked Choice Voting creates ...
“There are too many variables and questions in ranked choice voting that I now believe it should be scrapped.”
Comments
It's a shame that Lance Williams' approach to the issue of ranked choice voting not only leads to distorted portrayals of RCV elections, but also to miss important stories relating to his area of focus: money and politics. Take Ron Dudum's lawsuit against San Francisco. No serious lawyer that I've spoken to sees this lawsuit as going anywhere (indeed its logic would actually replacing plurality voting in elections all across the country with either top two runoffs or full-RCV ballots -- a change I'd take in a heartbeat, but don't expect to see). The federal judge's summary judgment against the lawsuit is quite devastating to the plaintiffs.
And yet this very expensive lawsuit goes on. As Williams points out, "powerhouse California political law firm of Nielsen, Merksamer, Parrinello, Mueller & Naylor" has put this together and recruited Dudum for its case. So who's paying the firm for the case? You'd think an investigative reporter might want to take a look at that issue, but no one has, including Williams.
Similarly, there are some wealthy interests who invested a lot in Don Perata's campaign for mayor. When the final reports come in on his campaign spending and that of independent expenditures on his behalf, the total is likely to be breathtaking. Yet I've heard he never broke 50% in one-on-one polling vs. Jean Quan, making her victory not as surprising as one might think -- but still an indicator that big money has less power when the fact that voters have real choices makes the usual negative attacks are less effective.
Anticipating this change, the San Francisco Ethics Commission passed a resolution backing implementation of RCV in its city -- pointing out how independent expenditures focused on negative attacks soared in runoffs. And indeed, several key RCV races have been won by candidates with less money than a loser. That would seemingly be interesting to a reporter focused on money and politics -- but nothing yet.
Having looked at the data myself, the numbers given by Lance for ballots that voters have marked erroneously looks about right. One thing I want to point out though is that only 526 ballots were actually discarded due to overvote errors, about 0.5% of the number of ballots that decided the Oakland Mayor election. Other ballots with errors were instead discarded because there were no votes for either of the two final candidates.
To reduce voter errors Oakland should have scanner machines developed with the ability to fully check the ballots for errors, and absentee voting should be minimized. Even then, some ballots with no errors will be discarded unless Oakland also provides more rank columns, preferably as many as there are candidates.
These are not the hallmarks of good investigative journalism. It is not merely the discussion of voter confusion that rankles RCV advocates, but the biased presentation of exaggerated, misinterpreted, and anonymously supplied statistics about voter confusion that is of legitimate concern.
Here are some questions that CaliforniaWatch could investigate and for which nearly everyone would benefit having answers:
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