Twenty Years of Ranked Choice Voting in California: The Scorecard
San Francisco voters ranked their first ballots in 2004. Twenty years later, we can judge ranked choice voting on results, not predictions.
Our national partners at FairVote did exactly that. Their new report, Two decades of ranked choice voting in California, analyzes RCV elections for 70 offices across the six California cities that use it: San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro, Albany, and Redondo Beach. (Eureka adopted RCV in 2020 but hasn't had a race with enough candidates to use it as of 2026.)
The headline findings:
Candidates of color won 64% of RCV races, up from 36% in the same cities before RCV. In San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, winners now roughly mirror the share of residents who are people of color.
Women won 44% of RCV races, up from 38%.
Cutting separate runoff elections saves these cities about $5 million per election cycle.
On average, 73% of voters rank the winner among their top three choices. That matters because it means roughly three in four voters actively backed the person who won, not just the plurality who picked them first.
The short version: RCV did what reformers promised. It moved the decisive vote to the higher-turnout election, saved taxpayers money, and produced city councils that look more like the communities they serve.
We break down each finding in its own post, from Oakland's turnout story to Albany's experiment with proportional RCV.
FairVote isn't the only source here. For a neutral tour of the broader research, the ABA Task Force for American Democracy's What We Know About Ranked Choice Voting, Updated for 2025 (March 2025) summarizes studies from across the country, including a peer-reviewed study of California cities.
Want these results in your city? Start with our guide to bringing RCV to your city.
This post is part of Cal RCV's series on Two decades of ranked choice voting in California, a May 2026 report by our partners at FairVote.
