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 ahead on election night once again, but Barbara Lee was eventually declared the winner after nine rounds of adjusting votes, discarding ballots and re-tabulation. Part of Lee’s eventual win was also due to California accepting ballots long after Election Day.

Mayor-elect Barbara Lee seems set to continue Thao’s failed policies, including gun buybacks, “violence interrupter” programs and the same “ceasefire” strategy as her predecessor. Basically, she’s going to ask criminals nicely to stop shooting and robbing quite so many people in Oakland.

Months before the election, Barbara Lee returned thousands of dollars donated to her campaign by a family linked to former Mayor  Thao’s corruption scandal. Barbara Lee was also one of the few prominent figures that publicly opposed the recall of Sheng Thao.

Oakland has become a case study in the failures of RCV. Does it lead to moderate winners? Absolutely not. Does it make politics kinder and gentler? Lee’s allies spent the final days of the campaign trying to tie Taylor, a long-time Democrat, to Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, while Taylor’s allies were pointing out Lee’s ties to Oakland’s corruption scandals.

RCV has even led to a failed election for the Oakland school board. Voter mistakes on their RCV ballots were compounded by a computer programing error by county officials. These RCV failures went undetected for long enough that the wrong winner actually took office.

All this highlights why some in Oakland are working to repeal RCV. Earlier this year, they announced plans to gather signatures for a petition that could lead to a vote on repeal. Oakland’s decline is clear, and it isn’t far-fetched to say that ranked-choice voting is playing a big role.

For the second time in under three years, RCV elected a far-left mayor with ties to a corrupt political family. It’s time for Oaklanders to take back their city once and for all and repeal ranked-choice voting before it’s too late.

Harry Roth is the Director of Outreach at Save Our States and Project Manager of the Stop RCV Coalition. 

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.