HARRY ROTH: Ranked Choice Voting Leads To Worse Leadership

Voters in Oakland, California, have elected a new mayor following the recall of Mayor Sheng Thao, who faced criticism for rising crime and an ongoing FBI corruption probe. Thao’s 2022 victory was due to the complexities of ranked-choice voting—which was also used this month to choose Mayor-elect Barbara Lee.

Ranked-choice voting, or RCV, comes from the left’s grab bag of bad ideas about “our democracy.” Ironically, it only makes voting harder and even disenfranchises voters.

With RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference instead of voting for one candidate. This makes ballots longer, with many more bubbles to fill in and more complicated instructions. RCV benefits voters who have plenty of spare time and access to information.

First-place rankings are counted first, and then the least popular candidate eliminated. On those ballots, if voters ranked someone second, rankings are adjusted upwards for the next round of counting. Ballots without other ranked candidates are discarded, resulting in a decrease in turnout with each round of counting.

Of course, all this is done by computers since doing it any other way would be too slow. The counting, adjusting and recounting happens over and over until a candidate has a majority of the supposed first-place votes.

RCV advocates claim it leads to better politics and more centrist winners. But in 2022, former city councilor Loren Taylor likely would have won if not for ranked-choice voting. He was the more moderate, reform-focused candidate. Instead, the radical Thao was elected, only to be later removed.

This year, Taylor appeared