Ranked Choice Voting and the 2014 Oakland

Mayoral Election Corey Cook, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Politics Director, Leo T. McCarthy Center for

Public Service and the Common Good

Ranked Choice Elections in the Bay Area

• 84 Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) elections in Alameda and San Francisco counties (2004-2013).

• 53 RCV elections determined without a runoff (50% winner on first choice ballots).

• 31 RCV elections involved “instant-runoff” procedure (37%).

• 5 RCV elections won by someone other than the top first-choice vote recipient.

• MOST of the time, the top first-choice vote recipient increased her or his lead in subsequent tallies.

• Two notable exceptions: Jean Quan (Oakland mayoral 2010) gaining 11.2% in second and third choices, and Lynette Gibson-McElhaney (Oakland City Council, 2012) gaining 10.2% in subsequent tallies.

Thinking about Voting Systems

• Voting systems as an aggregation of voter preferences

• Voting systems as an expression of voter preferences

• Voting systems as a method of conferring legitimacy on the winning candidate and providing a mandate to govern.

Voting Systems as an Aggregation of Voter Preferences

• “Not only is there imperfect reflection of voter preferences in the first instance, but

voter preferences themselves are shaped by the electoral system. Preferences do not and cannot exist independently of it.”

~Donald Horowitz, “Electoral Systems and Their Goals”

• “Theoretically, ranked-choice voting should produce electoral outcomes quite

different from those under single-member plurality. It should reduce ideologically extreme or hyper-partisan campaign messages, since candidates have an incentive to get as many lower preference votes as possible. It should also reduce negative campaigning, because in multi-candidate races, candidates need to be highly ranked by their opponents’ supporters in order to rise to a majority of the vote.”

~Stanford University Workshop on Electoral System Reform (2014)

Voting Systems as an Expression of Voter Preferences

• Three Rankings and Exhausted Ballots

• Not Well-Ordered Preferences in Ranked Choice Elections • Oakland 2010 Election • 122,269 voters • 2,430 different three candidate combinations

• Quan, Kaplan, Tuman together (any order): 21,012 ballots • Quan, Kaplan, Perata together (any order): 24,283 ballots • Quan, Tuman, Perata together (any order): 11,884 ballots • Kaplan, Tuman, Perata together (any order): 11,398 ballots

• Quan and Kapland together on 49,309 ballots • Quan and Perata together on 35,267 ballots

Voting Systems, Legitimacy and Mandates to Govern

• Results are not intuitive

• Reporting the results days later

• Stopping the count after someone reaches 50%

• Interpreting the margin of victory