Santa Clara County weighs ranked choice voting for some elections

The pieces are in place to seismically shift Silicon Valley elections — and Santa Clara County supervisors are holding all the cards.

For the first time in almost a year, the Board of Supervisors is expected to discuss a potential switch to ranked choice voting at its April 15 finance and government committee meeting. There, supervisors will weigh estimates on the cost of rolling out a system that lets voters rank their preferred candidates. If no single candidate receives more than half of the first choice votes, candidates are knocked off through subsequent rounds of tallying — second choice, third choice and so on — until a candidate reaches at least 50% of the highest ranked vote.

The idea is divisive, and yet the county has been uniquely empowered to get moving on it, from receiving majority voter support in 1998 to a 2023 state law carve-out enabling the system’s use in Santa Clara County. But some county supervisors aren’t in a hurry to make a final decision amid more pressing crises, such as a looming budget calamity.

“I am not anticipating a lengthy discussion at (the committee) — we just have too many other significant issues,” Supervisor Susan Ellenberg told San José Spotlight. “The reality is even if we were inclined to do something, there isn’t sufficient runway to put this in place for 2026, so even if there were full throated support we’d be talking about 2028 at the earliest.”

If approved by supervisors, ranked choice voting would only be used in races for supervisor, sheriff, district attorney, and county assessor . It would not apply to municipal elections — City Council races — in cities within the county such as San Jose, whose elected leaders killed the idea in 2022.

Switching models would require educating voters about how ranked choice voting works, and in different languages. Yet the county’s ongoing structural budget deficit put non-English voter education materials on the chopping block last year when supervisors grappled with closing a $250 million gap. Supervisors ultimately backed off the cuts amid backlash, but that didn’t stop a voter outreach billboard in San Jose from listing the wrong election date in Vietnamese.

“The administration had proposed cutting voter language services last year. We were able to save those, but the budget isn’t replete right now with opportunities to do new or even creative and innovative things,” Ellenberg said. “This does not rise in my mind to a high-priority issue right now. In some ways, it’s a solution looking for a problem.”

Proponents are eager

Activists pushing the model are mobilizing ahead of the county’s April 15 meeting. They argue the one-person-one-vote system is outdated and that primary voters have chosen the winner outright in five out of 13 county elections since 2000. That means those races never reached the November general election where voter turnout tends to be higher.

Marcela Miranda-Caballero, whose organization CalRCV is spearheading the push to make the switch in Santa Clara County as early as 2028, said ranked choice voting forces candidates to focus less on attacking rivals and more on specific policy proposals.

“We’re not saying ranked choice voting will eliminate negative campaigning — but it will reduce it significantly,” Miranda-Caballero told San José Spotlight.

Santa Clara County has shown an interest in ranked choice voting for some time. In 1998, voters passed Measure F which preemptively consented to the idea if adopted by 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.

Complication could arise

One of the proposal’s most vocal local skeptics is Santa Clara County Assessor Larry Stone, who argues ranked choice voting incentivizes and confuses people into voting for candidates they otherwise wouldn’t mark down. He warned it makes the system vulnerable to gaming by political operatives.

“Supporters argue the person who is elected gets the most votes. It’s absolutely not the case — it’s the person that gets the most votes in the final round of tallying,” Stone told San José Spotlight. “Confusion is not good for anything in life, least of all the most important thing we do as a society.”

Miranda-Caballero disagrees. She said outcomes in which second or third choice candidates prevail still represent voters’ feelings.

“It’s not someone you hate but not someone you love, it’s somewhere in the middle — it’s someone you can at least tolerate,” Miranda-Caballero said.

She added ranked choice voting has never been marketed as a panacea to unfair elections.

“We’re not claiming that ranked choice voting is going to save everything, but it’s a much better version of what we have now,” Miranda-Caballero told San José Spotlight.

Larry Gerston, a San Jose State University political science professor emeritus and NBC Bay Area political analyst, said the shift would require voters to be strategic in ways they’ve never had to be before.

“You have to watch out for strange alliances, where candidates could be coordinating second and third vote choices over the course of the campaign. People may not be aware of how candidates are conspiring with one another to get tradeoffs for the votes,” Gerston told San José Spotlight. “You may in the process get a candidate no one wants, who everyone marked as a second or third choice. The way ranked choice voting works, it could be someone downstream.”

Board President Otto Lee said the change would only impact a few elections in Silicon Valley, but could serve as a model for others to eventually opt into.

“During the current climate of disruption and uncertainty at the federal level, any changes to the election process could cause fear and anxiety,” Lee told San José Spotlight. “If (ranked-choice voting) is implemented, the process will be managed in collaboration with the community. We believe that residents will appreciate the additional choices offered by (ranked-choice voting) as they learn more about it.”

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