San Francisco Becomes Poster Child for Perils of Ranked Choice Voting

Despite its manifest deficiencies, Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) has been adopted (as of 2022) in jurisdictions inhabited by more than 11 million Americans, from Portland, Maine, to Berkeley, California. But the current electoral situation in San Francisco should serve as a warning to states and municipalities throughout the nation: don’t use Ranked Choice Voting to choose your officials.

Judging from recent migration trends, it appears that fewer people nowadays are choosing to “leave their hearts in San Francisco,” as Tony Bennett famously sang in the ‘60s. Instead, many are just leaving altogether, with the city’s population today seven percent shy of its 2019 peak.

Rampant crime and public vagrancy are one primary cause of this mass exodus – a consequence of the city’s “progressive” policies under the current mayor, London Breed, usually backed by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors.

As a result, as the New York Times reports, Breed has become rather unpopular and, with an election looming this November, has recently even been tacking a little towards the middle – for instance, now favoring increased policing, instead of her previous “depolicing” position. Meanwhile, several liberal-centrist opponents are running to her (relative) right, with a good chance that one of them could win.

But here’s the rub. Like a growing number of municipalities nationwide, San Francisco conducts its local elections through Ranked Choice Voting.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, RCV asks voters not just to choose one candidate, but rather to rank every candidate on the ballot (in San Francisco’s case, up to 10 individuals) in order of preference. Through a complicated process that normally takes days to complete, assuming that no candidate wins an absolute majority of the votes, election authorities then sift through the ballots, successively tossing out candidates who received the smallest overall number of preference-weighted ballots at each stage, until they finally arrive at a candidate who won a majority of the remaining ballots.

The winner might well be someone who, in a straight race for victory, would have placed only third or fourth (or even lower), but who came out ahead because his or her share of the first-place votes was enhanced by the number of ballots on which voters listed the winning candidate as their second, third, or lower choice.

The theory behind RCV is that it offers an opportunity for voters to still have a say in deciding election outcomes even if their first choice does not win. One main argument RCV proponents advance is that this system will encourage more voters to choose candidates outside the traditional Republican-Democrat binary, as they can do so without risking the “loss” of their vote by choosing a less popular candidate as their first choice. They can have their cake and eat it by ranking one of the likeliest winners first, but then giving candidates they really like a nod by assigning them votes lower down their ballot. (Since municipal elections in San Francisco are nominally nonpartisan, the Republican-vs.-Democrat issue doesn’t arise.)

It is no coincidence that the strongest advocates for RCV are on the far left. The RCV system has a particular appeal to fringe progressives who regret that, in most cases, their candidate has little chance of winning. The real-world effect of RCV is to encourage all sorts of fringe candidates to run, since one can never be sure that he or she might not accumulate enough “preference” votes lower down the ballot to win.

This is indeed what the Times reports may occur in the San Francisco election. Alongside the several moderate-liberal candidates now seeking to replace Breed, a new candidate has emerged, running more or less to her “left” – Aaron Peskin, a member of the City’s Board of Supervisors since 2000.

Peskin, as the Times notes, has established quite a record for himself while serving on the Board. He has long been known for alcohol-induced rants at meetings. (His current defense is that he has been on the wagon for three years and is still attending AA meetings.)

His behavioral peculiarities aside, Peskin has distinguished himself from other candidates most notably on two policy issues: (1) he opposes any crackdown on public drug use, and (2) unlike Breed, he opposes the construction of denser, high-rise housing units to address the city’s extreme need for affordable housing in the ritzy neighborhood of Telegraph Hill where he lives. Peskin actually persuaded a majority of his colleagues on the Board to override Breed’s veto of an ordinance he had gotten passed prohibiting dense housing in that neighborhood.

In other words, he’s the ultimate, hypocritical “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) liberal.

Peskin also attempted, unsuccessfully, to defeat a measure that Breed placed on the ballot in March requiring welfare recipients to undergo drug screening.

Under normal circumstances, one would not expect such a manifestly selfish, ill-tempered, and (formerly?) alcoholic candidate to win the mayoralty in a city facing so many problems. But because of RCV, all that Peskin needs in order to win the election, assuming Breed’s continuing unpopularity, is for the other candidates, running to her right, to divide the anti-Breed vote among themselves, while he retains enough of the base he’s accumulated from 24 years on the Board to win a lot of 2nd or 3rd-place votes.

The likelihood of a Peskin victory is increased by certain side effects of RCV that have been noted nationwide.

First, the confusing nature of this complex system can deter people from voting at all, or else cause them inadvertently to offer their support to candidates with whom they do not agree.

Second, since few who do vote are going to be at all familiar with the qualifications or policies of more than one or two candidates, they probably won’t rank more than those few. This gives an extra advantage to fringe candidates who offer enough ideological or personal appeal to win votes even lower down the ballot just on account of name recognition to outlast more moderate rivals during the successive waves of candidate removal.

A Peskin victory would constitute a clear blow to democracy and underscore the dangers of RCV. The classic formula for legitimate republican government, at least as far back as Aristotle, is somehow to combine wisdom among the governors with the consent of the governed. Elections are an imperfect, but nonetheless the best available, means of achieving that end. (Hence Aristotle calls them both a “democratic” and an “aristocratic” device – the latter because they rest on the assumption that some people are legitimately better qualified to govern than others, possessing a greater degree of areté, that is, and intellectual and moral virtue.)

Although our Declaration of Independence, echoing Aristotle, states that legitimate governments derive their powers from the people’s consent, that of course does not guarantee that government will pursue all the policies, and only the policies, that each voter personally favors – an impossibility.

Rather, our republican form of government rests on the expectation that whoever gets elected (or appointed) to office is likely to pursue policies that are reasonably acceptable, or at least tolerable, to the large majority of the population – including those who voted for the losing party or candidate.

Our Constitutional structure, including such devices as separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and the very existence of a written Constitution, is designed to maximize the likelihood of that result. Our two-party system, though not authorized by the Constitution, tends to have the same consequence, making it more likely that whichever party wins an election will pursue at least relatively moderate policies – unlike the situation in pseudo-democracies in many countries in Africa, South America, and the Middle East, where political, ethnic, economic, or religious minorities may feel compelled to flee if the other party wins.

Although municipal governments do not typically resemble the structure of the federal Constitution, our “first past the post” electoral systems normally have the effect of encouraging candidates to “run toward the middle” of the electorate in their city to maximize their chances of victory. (Of course, the “middle” of San Francisco’s electorate will be well to the left of the middle in, say, Dallas, but that’s the advantage of federalism: you always have a choice, in principle, to move to a place whose policies you find more congenial.)

By contrast, Ranked Choice Voting appeals only to two sorts of people: those strongly attached to ideological extremes of one sort or another, and abstract “political theorists” who complain that conventional electoral systems fail to give due voice to voter “preferences.”

But the purpose of an election isn’t to satisfy preferences – unlike, say, what a supermarket aims to do. It is rather intended to promote policies that will be both effective and satisfactory, based on reasoned consideration, in the judgment of the vast majority of the people. RCV can only be detrimental to that goal.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.