Santa Clara County is considering a fundamental change to voting, which is moving to a ranked-choice voting model. Robert Handa reports,
Santa Clara County is considering a fundamental change to voting, which is moving to a ranked-choice voting model.
The move comes as Congress is looking at a measure called the “Voter Choice Act,” which would help fund local and state governments who make the switch.
Ranked-choice voting is when voters rank all the candidates in order of preference.
Santa Clara Supervisor Otto Lee is proposing the change. He said it’s cheaper with one election, there would be an outright winner and often, more people vote in the primary than in a final race between the top contenders.
“Sometimes people think it’s too difficult, hard to understand. But it really isn’t. It's really, number one, number two, number three, who do you like the most? and then, second and third. So that way, everybody’s vote would be able to be counted,” he said.
The proposal has supporters and detractors. Recently, NBC Bay Area’s news partner, the San Jose Spotlight, talked to some officials against it, including Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone and the local NAACP.
San Jose rejected the idea two years ago. But ranked-choice voting is the process in San Francisco, where Mayor London Breed ended up in a much closer race when she first ran and in Oakland, where Mayor Sheng Thao won with a surge of second-choice votes.
Longtime Bay Area lawmaker Don Perata lost the previous Oakland mayor race to Jean Quan, despite having more first place votes.
“It really dumbs down the process, because you never get a chance to debate anybody one-on-one. You’re always trying to hammer down the least offensive spiel, so that you can pick up more than one vote,” Perata said.
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Now, the House of Representatives is reconsidering the "Voter Choice Act," which would provide funding to local and state governments to switch to ranked choice voting.
South Bay congressman Ro Khanna said he is for it.
“Sometimes having the person who can build the most consensus is important and rank choice voting just makes that easier. So, now you can’t just talk to the far right or the far left. You’ve got to talk to everyone,” he said.
Santa Clara County plans to take up the issue this summer, while Khanna said he hopes the Voter Choice Act can be addressed before the November election.
Overall, ranked choice voting has been picking up momentum and is now used in 50 cities and counties in 14 states.
