Not so many years ago, someone I respect very much decided to run for Irvine City Council. I don’t want to embarrass him by naming him. But let it suffice to say that he’s a person of great perspicacity and character who knows the issues affecting Irvine and who wanted to do his part to make Irvine better. I see so many candidates who seem to run as an ego trip or an opening act for larger political ambitions. They learn Irvine issues on the fly. When I ask their supporters why they’re running and what they hope to accomplish, I get radio silence.
That wasn’t my friend. And I was excited to support his candidacy. But it transpired that there was another Democrat running in the same district whom my friend judged to have a better chance of winning. He didn’t want to split the vote, so he gracefully bowed out. I respect that decision greatly — many of us on the Left wish that more of the umpteen Dems currently running for governor had the same willingness to put the greater good ahead of their own campaigns. But I do not respect the electoral system that forced my friend to make that decision: plurality voting — a.k.a. first-past-the-post.
It’s funny what baked-in assumptions we’re willing to accept in our society. I once found myself arguing with someone about the merits of public transit. This person thought that public transit was dangerous because crime occasionally happens on public transit vehicles. “You realize,” I said, “that someone is killed by private automobiles every 12 to 15 minutes and that the private automobile has been responsible for killing more Americans than all our wars combined, right?” Didn’t matter to him, though. All those deaths are just baked into the equation. It can be so easy for us to commit to business as usual, even when we’re in the business of insanity.
Now, the logic of fairness in democracy is very sane. It’s almost playground-simple. We need to decide what to do as a group. Let’s do the thing that most of us want to do. But when your elections allow for the thing that only some of us want to do to win, that logic is shattered.
Here in Irvine, 10 of the 16 mayoral elections in which someone wasn’t running unopposed were won with only a plurality of the vote. In 2024, Larry Agran won with 38.76%. It’s possible that if you could ask the remaining 61.24% of voters who their second or third choices would have been, enough of them would have said “Larry” for him to reach a majority. But it’s also possible that all those voters would have preferred someone else in the event that their first choice didn’t win. The playground-simple logic of democracy is that we should be governed by those whom the majority support. But our system doesn’t insist on it. Our system can even allow rule by those whom the majority do not want in office.
And there it is again: the business of insanity as usual. The entire basis for the legitimacy of government in our society is “majority rules”. But we routinely don’t even bother to do the work of figuring out what the majority really wants. Enter Ranked Choice Voting.
Ranked Choice Voting answers the question “what if you could ask every voter who they’d support if their first choice couldn’t win?” And its answer is simple. It just bothers to ask.
Ranked choice voting has voters rank the candidates in order of preference. Only like one candidate? That’s fine. Just vote for that one. Only like two? Rank only those two. But the system doesn’t stop at asking you who your first choice is, and ballots are redistributed to the second, third, or fourth choices and so on as each lowest vote-getting candidate is eliminated.
Think of it this way: if you and a group of friends were trying to decide on where to go out for dinner and you were the only person who said “Chili’s,” you wouldn’t expect to be frozen out of the rest of the conversation, would you? No, you’d expect to be able to weigh in when half of your friends want to go to Outback and the other half want to go to Olive Garden. Why should the way we run our democracy be any different?
RCV turns an election into a negotiation between all the voters — the same kind of negotiation you and your friends enter into when deciding on dinner. Only with elections, the stakes are our future and the legitimacy of our governments! And I, for one, think we ought to know what each of you have to say once Chili’s is ruled out.
My friend who dropped his candidacy for city council might not have won. His contribution to the election might only have been introducing ideas and more options to the voters. Or he might have surprised everyone — and himself. Sadly, we’ll never know. Polls currently show that around half of voters support a Democrat for governor to the roughly 30% of voters who support a Republican. And yet we face the possibility that we’ll be choosing between two Republicans in November because that Democratic support is split between eight candidates! Every kid on a playground knows that’s not fair or just. Every kid on a playground knows it’s not democracy. And we already have an alternative system we can turn to that would allow us to do better — to make sure that future mayors of Irvine and governors of California aren’t achieving power because some small group of voters liked them best. This coming Tuesday, Irvine City Councilmembers Kathleen Treseder, Betty Martinez Franco, and Melinda Liu have put the adoption of Ranked Choice Voting on the agenda. Here’s hoping that sanity can win the day.
I had to invite Joshua to write this here, after watching the comical sight of him trying to talk sense into the dense Dan Chmielewski here:
https://theliberaloc.com/2026/04/07/irvine-city-council-asking-to-add-ranked-choice-voting-for-city-elections/comment-page-1/#comment-289097
A high point:
Great article on Ranked Choice Voting Josh! I wholeheartedly agree. I want more control with my vote. We only have one vote and it would be great if the individual voter had more control into how our sacred vote will play out. I fully support RCV in Irvine!
My advice to Mr. Moore, who seems like an eminently reasonable man is the same as I always give Vern. DON’T TOUCH GODDAMN THE PINK TOAD.
The indigenous tribe folk of Guatemala know this very well.
If it touches me first, all bets are off.
Yes, I know that’s the impulse but you gotta know what the Guatemalan hill folk know: you get poisoned and Pink Toad just goes on being a happy, stupid Pink Toad.
RCV should be adopted statewide so cities and counties don’t have to do it piecemeal. It saves money, discourages negative campaigning, guarantees a winner with actual majority support, and eliminates the spoiler factor, thus encouraging participation.
Now that many cities elect council members by district, using RCV is much easier to implement than it would have been for tallying at-large votes.
If California had adopted RCV instead of the current top two system for state office elections Democrats wouldn’t be freaking out right now about the gubernatorial primary possibly landing two Republicans on the ballot in November.
The Green Party has advocated for RCV for decades. Why does it take Democrats so long to learn? Would they really rather lose to Republicans than let anyone else into the game?
You’re absolutely right that California should adopt it statewide — and should already have done so. And you’re absolutely right that we Dems have been too slow to push for it. (Which is depressingly on-brand for us.) I think piecemeal implementation is unfortunately our best road to get there. A lot of people need to be able to see a good idea in action in familiar settings before they can believe in it. (I hear it in Irvine politics all the time — “it’s already been implemented in the following OC cities” is always a strong selling point.)