By Jose Navarro
My support for Ranked Choice Voting started with my experience following local political campaigns as President of Sacramento’s Latino Democratic Club. In fact, our club is part of “Better Ballot Sacramento,” a coalition proposing Ranked Choice Voting for Sacramento’s local elections, because Ranked Choice Voting works better than the systems Sacramento currently has in place.
But the need to improve our local election process became especially real for me when I personally ran for office last year. I’m honored that the voters elected me to the Sacramento City Unified School District Board of Trustees, and I believe such boards deserve a more equitable and effective election process.
School districts in Sacramento elect their trustees by an election process called “plurality,” which means whoever gets the most votes wins. In my race last year, it was easy for the plurality process to elect a candidate who is the choice of the majority of voters, because only two candidates ran.
But what if three, four, or more candidates are running? In practice, plurality often elects a candidate with support from far less than half of voters. This happens because multiple candidates split the vote. As a result, election outcomes are often unrepresentative of the community’s real preference.
For city council elections, Sacramento tries to solve this vote-splitting problem by administering a “two-round runoff.” Any number of candidates can run in the Primary Election in the Spring and, if no candidate wins more than half of the votes, then the top-two vote-getters run again in the General Election in the Fall.
But Sacramento’s two-round runoff creates its own problems. In practice, three out of every four races for city council are decided by the Primary, because a candidate usually wins a majority of the small number of votes cast in the Primary. That’s concerning because Primaries consistently get low voter turnout, especially among young voters and Latino voters.
When council races do go to a runoff in the Fall, it requires each candidate to run a whole second campaign. Having just run a campaign for school board, I can attest to the exhausting and expensive ordeal of merely running one campaign, let alone two. The city’s current process places an immense and wasteful burden on candidates (and the residents who get all their mailers) when a runoff is triggered.
Ranked Choice Voting avoids the problems created by plurality and the two-round runoff. Ranked Choice Voting allows the voter to rank the candidates on their ballot by preference. If your top choice can’t win, then your vote automatically counts instead for your second choice.
By condensing this “runoff” into a single election, Sacramento could improve the election process for city council races as well as for school board races. We could increase voter participation in city council elections by allowing all candidates to run in the General Election in the Fall, where more people vote and diverse voices can be heard. We could also run school board races with full confidence that the outcome will reflect the majority’s preference, every time.
Dozens of cities and counties already use Ranked Choice Voting throughout the United States. The only challenge to getting it adopted in Sacramento is that few people here know about it.
That’s why I support the “Better Ballot Sacramento” initiative to raise awareness of Ranked Choice Voting. One of our messages is that the benefits of Ranked Choice Voting are not theoretical. Research consistently finds that Ranked Choice Voting improves voter engagement, voter satisfaction, equity, and representation, through more than 500 elections that have already been held using Ranked Choice Voting.
Anyone interested in learning more is encouraged to check out www.BetterBallotSacramento.org. Together, we can improve Sacramento’s elections process.
Jose Navarro is President of the Latino Democratic Club of Sacramento County and also serves on the Sacramento City Unified School District Board of Trustees.
No ranked choice voting is good for high school
Prom King and Queen not for grown ups