What to know about ranked-choice voting in SF
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Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios
Ranked-choice voting is poised to play a critical role in determining the winner of San Francisco's crowded mayoral race next week, and some candidates are getting ahead of it by directing supporters to use certain voting strategies.
Why it matters: The process eliminates the need for runoff elections and gives voters more choice, but it can be confusing for people who are participating in our elections for the first time.
- It can also cause surprising outcomes where unexpected candidates beat out opponents who had early leads.
State of play: Every voter's ballot should show a grid for each contest, with candidates in the far-left column and rankings on the top row.
- All you need to do is rank the candidates by filling in ovals from left to right: first choice in the first column, second choice in the second column, third choice in the third column and so on.
- Feel free to rank as many or as few candidates as you'd like, but make sure you don't give the same rank to more than one candidate.
- Once ballots are submitted, San Francisco conducts a multi-round process to assess the winning candidate.
How it works: Elections officials will count all the first-choice votes for every candidate in the first round. If a single candidate emerges with more than 50% of votes, that candidate wins and no further rounds are needed.
- If there is no one with more than 50%, they'll begin eliminating the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes. Voters whose first-choice candidate is eliminated in this way will have their second-choice candidate counted as their new top choice.
- If no candidate has at least 50% of the votes, the city will repeat the eliminating process until the 50% threshold is reached and a winner is declared.
The big picture: San Francisco enacted ranked-choice voting in 2004 for several city political offices after voters approved the change in 2002.
- Recent polling shows no mayoral candidate has the approval of at least 50% of voters, which means ranked-choice voting figures to play a key role this year.
- The San Francisco Chronicle's final poll, published last week, found that about 24% of likely voters selected Mayor London Breed as their top pick, followed by roughly 23% who selected Levi's heir Daniel Lurie.
- But after accounting for ranked-choice voting among the top five candidates, Lurie surged ahead of Breed to lead 56% to 44%.
What to watch: Former interim mayor Mark Farrell has so far released the most explicit voting strategy, which includes an alliance with Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, in a bid to bolster his chances.
- He has asked his supporters to include Safaí — who has consistently polled last among the top five candidates — on their ballot and exclude Mayor London Breed and Supervisor Aaron Peskin.