Santa Clara County committee says ranked choice voting saves money

Santa Clara County’s special assessor race this year has cost the county tens of millions of dollars. A county advisory board said ranked choice voting would have avoided that.

Amid winter storms and holiday festivities, county voters were asked to cast their ballot by Dec. 30 — raising concerns about low voter turnout deciding the region’s next chief property taxer. Candidates Neysa Fligor and Rishi Kumar won the most votes during the Nov. 4 special election, but neither got enough to win outright.

The result — on top of spending $13 million for the November race — will have officials shelling out another $13 million to conduct the runoff, according to official estimates. The county received $17 million from the state to cover the cost of November’s election, according to the Registrar of Voters.

“Ranked choice voting can save money for local governments and for candidates by eliminating the need for primary elections,” reads a December report to the Santa Clara County Citizens’ Advisory Commission on Elections. “As an example, (ranked choice voting) may have eliminated the cost of the Assessor runoff election scheduled for Dec. 2025.”

Ranked choice voting is a system where voters rank a candidate from first choice, second, third and so on.  If no single candidate receives more than half of the first choice votes, candidates are knocked off through subsequent rounds of tallying until a candidate reaches at least 50% of the highest ranked vote. Officials have previously estimated enacting the system would cost about $4 million in the first year, if applied only to countywide elected offices such as supervisor, sheriff, district attorney and assessor.

One of two commission reports this month refrained from suggesting ranked choice voting be used for all elections. Congressional and Assembly district seats span multiple counties, raising concerns that inter-county tallying would still be expensive. A state law change would also need to happen to use ranked choice voting for congressional and state legislative seats.

“As you all know, the county is very financially constrained,”  Steve Chessin, president of Californians for Electoral Reform and ranked choice voting advocate, said at the commission’s Dec. 2 meeting.

For now, advocates suggest the county adopt ranked choice voting for special elections to fill vacancies for legislative seats wholly contained within the county — the assessor’s office being an example.

The idea has been divisive, with vocal opposition from former Assessor Larry Stone, whose resignation in July — after 30 years on the job — set the special election into motion.

Yet the county has been uniquely empowered to get moving on the model. In 1998, voters passed Measure F which preemptively consented to the idea if adopted by the Board of Supervisors. In 2019, the county purchased voting machines that would make ranked choice voting possible. State lawmakers further paved the path when they passed Assembly Bill 1227 — authored by Silicon Valley Assemblymember Alex Lee and then-Assemblymember Evan Low — which specifically allowed Santa Clara County officials to override a statewide barrier to ranked choice voting and adopt the model.

But county supervisors aren’t in a hurry. In recent years they’ve repeatedly punted a final decision on the model amid their budget crisis.
While the commission’s report held off on the idea of a full-scale implementation for multi-county elections, it signaled those elections are not an impossible hurdle.

“That is a solvable problem, but one that does not need to be solved for this recommendation,” the report reads.

Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.