Zany instant runoff race in San Francisco gives voters thousands of choices
By Timm Herdt
Ventura County Star
Posted October 1, 2011 at 6:33 p.m.
© 2011 Ventura County Star. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. 
SAN FRANCISCO — The city that is home to the crookedest street in the world is this fall witnessing what surely could be the zaniest election in America.
There are 16 people running for mayor and hardly a gadfly in the bunch. The field includes the current appointed mayor, two county supervisors, a state senator, the public defender, the city attorney, the assessor-recorder and three former supervisors.
Each is eligible for up to $900,000 in public financing, so none will be starved for campaign funds. Even those who find themselves dropping in the polls will be able to keep battling through Election Day.
When voters receive their ballots, they will have not one, not two, not even just 16 choices to make. Rather, under the instant-runoff voting system that is being used for the first time in a San Francisco mayoral election, they will have 3,360 distinct ways they could fill out their ballot.
"It's what we call the chaos theory," says San Francisco pollster Ben Tulchin, whose firm is working with the campaign of Sen. Leland Yee.
Tulchin believes it's possible the mayoral outcome could resemble that of a bizarre, 21-candidate race for San Francisco supervisor two years ago in which the winner, Malia Cohen, finished fourth in the first round of voting but won the contest in the 19th round of redistributed votes.
"She had 12 percent of the vote after the first round — and she won," Tulchin noted. "That's how diabolical ranked-choice voting is."
Pollsters and political consultants generally shudder at the mention of "instant runoff voting," but it has in recent years become a celebrated cause of election reformers, who promote it as a way to reinvigorate American democracy by expanding voter choices and diminishing the influence of the two major parties.
Here's how it works: Each voter gets one ballot and ranks the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of the No. 1 selections, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and his or her supporters' second choices are distributed to the remaining candidates. The process is repeated until one candidate has a majority.
Those who watched the Academy Awards last year may be familiar with the process; it was, for the first time, the way voting for the Oscars was conducted.
Instant runoff voting in political campaigns is widely used around the world, and has been employed in Australia for nearly a century. In the United States, its use is limited to a handful of jurisdictions and is most heavily concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro and San Francisco use it in their municipal elections.
Rob Richie, executive director of the Maryland-based nonprofit FairVote, believes the high-profile San Francisco mayor's election will boost public support for instant runoff voting because "there is a rising sense that it would be of value to have more than two candidates" in elections.
Richie says he does not know how the fall campaign will play out, but of this he is certain: "It's not going to be chaotic. We think it's great."
The same scenario unfolding in San Francisco, he noted, also is playing out this fall in Portland, Maine, where 15 candidates are running in that city's first ranked-choice mayoral campaign.
Among the system's advocates are the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, both of which endorse the idea for all elections, not simply in nonpartisan races such as county and municipal elections in California.
Plurality-win elections, they say, make it impossible for third-party candidates to make inroads with voters. Because minor-party candidates are often seen as potential "spoilers," voters are reluctant to support them, and instead pick what they may consider to be the lesser of two evils among major candidates.
Under instant runoff voting, Richie said, all voters can support their preferred candidate, even if that candidate has little chance of winning. They can then use their second choice to pick from among the candidates with the likeliest chances to win.
"The idea of a spoiler, that's totally a function of the plurality system," he said.
In addition, he noted, voters in ranked-choice cities can expect more civil campaigns than voters elsewhere have become accustomed to.
He points out that in the Wisconsin recall elections earlier this year, 95 percent of paid campaign advertising consisted of attacks on opponents. In an instant runoff election, negative ads carry three big risks — those who support the candidate being attacked will rule out the attacker as a second or third choice, some voters will not support a candidate who runs what they perceive to be a negative campaign, and even if the attacker succeeds in knocking down his target it could turn out to be to the benefit of an entirely different candidate.
"You will still see some negative campaigning, but you will see a much more delicate approach," Richie said.
Assemblywoman Fiona Ma — one of the seemingly few San Francisco politicians not running for mayor — said the victor will be the candidate who appeals to the most voters and is disliked by the least. "Mr. Congeniality is going to be the winner," she said.
Until this fall, the most prominent ranked-choice race in California had been last fall's Oakland mayoral campaign, in which Jean Quan knocked off the heavy favorite, former Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata — after coming in second in the first-round of balloting.
In that race, however, there were only four candidates and a clear favorite, so the Quan campaign was able to successfully employ an "anybody but Perata" approach, and persuaded supporters of the other two candidates to make Quan their second choice.
"We had to make it about Perata being an unacceptable choice," said political strategist Parke Skelton, who managed Quan's campaign. "There's no dynamic like that in San Francisco. It's a totally different kind of race."
In San Francisco this fall, every candidate is going to have to use all their resources to try to build a citywide base. "That's a fairly expensive proposition," he said, especially in a city with so many ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhoods. "It becomes an almost overwhelmingly complex organizational task."
Skelton, who says he turned down offers from multiple San Francisco candidates to run their campaigns, believes the race sets up so that "the candidate who starts out with the broadest, most favorable name-identification is going to win." That candidate is likely appointed Mayor Ed Lee, who promised he wouldn't seek election on his own, but broke that pledge a few days before the candidate-filing deadline.
Although supporters of instant runoff voting tout the belief that the system ensures the winner will have some level of support from a majority, rather than a plurality, of voters, a 16-candidate field makes it unlikely that will be the case in San Francisco.
Tulchin, the pollster, believes the ultimate winner could be someone who is selected in the top three by as few as 35 percent of voters, after all the ballots on which all three choices were for lesser candidates are eliminated.
"Voters have gotten more familiar with instant runoff voting," he said. "But it's still a mess."
Richie, the head of the ranked-choice voting advocacy group, acknowledges the possibility the winner will be someone who is picked by less than a majority, but blames that phenomenon on the fact San Francisco's vote-counting technology can accommodate only three choices. He'd like to see voters be able to rank all, or at least most of the candidates in their order of preference.
But even with that limitation, he said, this much will be certain: "The one who wins will be ranked ahead of the second-place finisher a majority of times."
There are 16 people running for mayor and hardly a gadfly in the bunch. The field includes the current appointed mayor, two county supervisors, a state senator, the public defender, the city attorney, the assessor-recorder and three former supervisors.
Each is eligible for up to $900,000 in public financing, so none will be starved for campaign funds. Even those who find themselves dropping in the polls will be able to keep battling through Election Day.
When voters receive their ballots, they will have not one, not two, not even just 16 choices to make. Rather, under the instant-runoff voting system that is being used for the first time in a San Francisco mayoral election, they will have 3,360 distinct ways they could fill out their ballot.
"It's what we call the chaos theory," says San Francisco pollster Ben Tulchin, whose firm is working with the campaign of Sen. Leland Yee.
Tulchin believes it's possible the mayoral outcome could resemble that of a bizarre, 21-candidate race for San Francisco supervisor two years ago in which the winner, Malia Cohen, finished fourth in the first round of voting but won the contest in the 19th round of redistributed votes.
"She had 12 percent of the vote after the first round — and she won," Tulchin noted. "That's how diabolical ranked-choice voting is."
Pollsters and political consultants generally shudder at the mention of "instant runoff voting," but it has in recent years become a celebrated cause of election reformers, who promote it as a way to reinvigorate American democracy by expanding voter choices and diminishing the influence of the two major parties.
Here's how it works: Each voter gets one ballot and ranks the candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of the No. 1 selections, the candidate with the least votes is eliminated and his or her supporters' second choices are distributed to the remaining candidates. The process is repeated until one candidate has a majority.
Those who watched the Academy Awards last year may be familiar with the process; it was, for the first time, the way voting for the Oscars was conducted.
Instant runoff voting in political campaigns is widely used around the world, and has been employed in Australia for nearly a century. In the United States, its use is limited to a handful of jurisdictions and is most heavily concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area. Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro and San Francisco use it in their municipal elections.
Rob Richie, executive director of the Maryland-based nonprofit FairVote, believes the high-profile San Francisco mayor's election will boost public support for instant runoff voting because "there is a rising sense that it would be of value to have more than two candidates" in elections.
Richie says he does not know how the fall campaign will play out, but of this he is certain: "It's not going to be chaotic. We think it's great."
The same scenario unfolding in San Francisco, he noted, also is playing out this fall in Portland, Maine, where 15 candidates are running in that city's first ranked-choice mayoral campaign.
Among the system's advocates are the Green Party and the Libertarian Party, both of which endorse the idea for all elections, not simply in nonpartisan races such as county and municipal elections in California.
Plurality-win elections, they say, make it impossible for third-party candidates to make inroads with voters. Because minor-party candidates are often seen as potential "spoilers," voters are reluctant to support them, and instead pick what they may consider to be the lesser of two evils among major candidates.
Under instant runoff voting, Richie said, all voters can support their preferred candidate, even if that candidate has little chance of winning. They can then use their second choice to pick from among the candidates with the likeliest chances to win.
"The idea of a spoiler, that's totally a function of the plurality system," he said.
In addition, he noted, voters in ranked-choice cities can expect more civil campaigns than voters elsewhere have become accustomed to.
He points out that in the Wisconsin recall elections earlier this year, 95 percent of paid campaign advertising consisted of attacks on opponents. In an instant runoff election, negative ads carry three big risks — those who support the candidate being attacked will rule out the attacker as a second or third choice, some voters will not support a candidate who runs what they perceive to be a negative campaign, and even if the attacker succeeds in knocking down his target it could turn out to be to the benefit of an entirely different candidate.
"You will still see some negative campaigning, but you will see a much more delicate approach," Richie said.
Assemblywoman Fiona Ma — one of the seemingly few San Francisco politicians not running for mayor — said the victor will be the candidate who appeals to the most voters and is disliked by the least. "Mr. Congeniality is going to be the winner," she said.
Until this fall, the most prominent ranked-choice race in California had been last fall's Oakland mayoral campaign, in which Jean Quan knocked off the heavy favorite, former Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata — after coming in second in the first-round of balloting.
In that race, however, there were only four candidates and a clear favorite, so the Quan campaign was able to successfully employ an "anybody but Perata" approach, and persuaded supporters of the other two candidates to make Quan their second choice.
"We had to make it about Perata being an unacceptable choice," said political strategist Parke Skelton, who managed Quan's campaign. "There's no dynamic like that in San Francisco. It's a totally different kind of race."
In San Francisco this fall, every candidate is going to have to use all their resources to try to build a citywide base. "That's a fairly expensive proposition," he said, especially in a city with so many ethnically and culturally diverse neighborhoods. "It becomes an almost overwhelmingly complex organizational task."
Skelton, who says he turned down offers from multiple San Francisco candidates to run their campaigns, believes the race sets up so that "the candidate who starts out with the broadest, most favorable name-identification is going to win." That candidate is likely appointed Mayor Ed Lee, who promised he wouldn't seek election on his own, but broke that pledge a few days before the candidate-filing deadline.
Although supporters of instant runoff voting tout the belief that the system ensures the winner will have some level of support from a majority, rather than a plurality, of voters, a 16-candidate field makes it unlikely that will be the case in San Francisco.
Tulchin, the pollster, believes the ultimate winner could be someone who is selected in the top three by as few as 35 percent of voters, after all the ballots on which all three choices were for lesser candidates are eliminated.
"Voters have gotten more familiar with instant runoff voting," he said. "But it's still a mess."
Richie, the head of the ranked-choice voting advocacy group, acknowledges the possibility the winner will be someone who is picked by less than a majority, but blames that phenomenon on the fact San Francisco's vote-counting technology can accommodate only three choices. He'd like to see voters be able to rank all, or at least most of the candidates in their order of preference.
But even with that limitation, he said, this much will be certain: "The one who wins will be ranked ahead of the second-place finisher a majority of times."
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