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In an East Bay Express interview, Richmond Mayor-elect Eduardo Martinez, the city's first Latino mayor, said ranked choice voting is more democratic and would be good for Richmond. Martinez won his 2022 race with about 37% of the vote in a four-way contest, a result that fed local calls for Richmond to follow Oakland and adopt RCV. Read the full piece at the East Bay Express for more details.

The League of Women Voters of Alameda and its supporters want a 2024 ballot measure giving Alameda the option to adopt ranked choice voting. The piece argues RCV makes winners earn broad support, cuts down on polarization and negative campaigning, and encourages more women and people of color to run. It also notes that RCV saves the cost and delay of a separate runoff when a majority winner is required. Read the full piece at the Alameda Post for more details.

After losing candidate Loren Taylor criticized ranked choice voting, The Oaklandside asked Oakland elections expert and Cal RCV consultant Sean Dugar how the system performed in the 2022 mayor's race. Dugar noted that Oakland never elected a woman mayor before RCV and has elected only women since it arrived in 2010. He added that more Black officials have been elected under RCV than at any other point in the city's history, even as its Black population shrinks. Read the full piece at The Oaklandside for more details.

The Mercury News editorial board urges the Bay Area to embrace ranked choice voting. In multi-candidate races, especially low-turnout primaries, a candidate can win with 20 to 30 percent of the vote, an outcome that too often favors extreme or negative candidates and hurts minority candidates. RCV strengthens majority rule and gives voters a greater say in who wins. Read the full editorial at the San Jose Mercury News for more details.

The 2022 Midterm Election is over, and although the results are still coming in, Ranked Choice Voting was used and voted to be implemented throughout the state. - The Alameda County Registrar of Voters fulfilled their promises of promptly posting RCV results on the web, and continuing eliminations until two candidates remain. - Albany had a multi-winner RCV election, also known as Proportional Ranked Choice Voting (PRCV). The final winners were determined by surplus transfers. The candidates leading in the first round won. - Berkeley city council district 1, San Leandro mayor, and San Leandro council district 1 also went to multiple rounds, where the first-round leader won. All other contests in San Francisco and the East Bay were settled in the first round. - Although Eureka approved RCV via a ballot measure in 2020, they did not use RCV in this election because the Secretary of State would not certify their voting machines for an RCV election. However, this did not make a difference because every election was a race between two or fewer candidates. - The Oakland mayoral race still has mail-in ballots being counted the latest results are here on the Official Election Site of Alameda County. As of Friday, November 11th, the race has gone 9 rounds, with 5 of the 10 candidates eliminated. Three candidates were above 10% in the first round. Also, in Oakland, the school board district 4 race had the first-round second-place candidate pull ahead and win in the second round. - Ranked choice voting had a big win in Ojai with 56% of the voters saying yes to Measure M. The Ojai Valley Democratic Club led an army of volunteers to spread the word about RCV, putting door hangers on every single household. The Ojai City Council now has the authority from the voters to adopt RCV at their discretion, and RCV could be used for their 2024 election for the first time. - Palm Desert used RCV for their election for the FIRST time! Voters used multi-winner PRCV to elect at-large city council members. Just like in Albany, the two first-round leaders are also leading in the final-round count. Full details here. RCV was enacted in 2020 via a lawsuit settlement regarding the California Voting Rights Act (CVRA) and the dilution of the Latino population. - The Redondo Beach City Council unanimously approved a motion for city staff to put together language for an RCV ballot measure. Two more key votes must occur for RCV to be adopted in Redondo Beach: In December 2022, the City Council must approve the language and refer the measure to the ballot The voters of Redondo Beach must approve the measure at their upcoming March 2023 election If you're interested in getting involved with Ranked Choice Voting in California, sign up to volunteer here or consider making a donation.

*Featuring Tom Charron from CalRCV GO VOTE. Politics in the US has gotten more and more extreme over the past few years. A complex mix of changes in class, laws, technology, and the media have created a witches' brew for political extremism. The January 6th insurrection and the recent assassination attempt on Nancy Pelosi underscore this new brand of violent political extremism. Rank Choice Voting (RCV) is one way many experts suggest we can slow down, stop, and even reverse this trend in extremism. RCV supporters also claim the voting rule change would eliminate "spoiler votes" and open up all elections to third-party candidates. To understand RCV more, in this episode of SFM, Scot and Braus interviewed Tom Charron the cofounder of CalRCV, the organization fighting for Ranked Choice Voting in California. The solution this week is not RCV itself; instead, the gang explores some potential out-of-the-box ways to spread RCV across the state and the country. Listen to the podcast on Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Google Podcasts

Columnist Joe Mathews argues for structural changes to California's election system. Among them, he proposes replacing the top-two system's two redundant rounds of voting with ranked choice voting and instant runoffs in June, so winners are decided in a single round. Read the full piece at the San Jose Mercury News for more details.

AB 2808, introduced by Assemblymember Patrick O'Donnell (D-Long Beach), would have prohibited ranked choice voting (RCV) in all California state and local elections — including in charter cities like San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland that have used the system successfully for over a decade. The bill was held in the Assembly Elections Committee on Wednesday, April 13, 2022, after Committee Chair Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles) declined to bring it to a vote. O'Donnell, a self-described "defender of the American electoral process," made the curious procedural offer of having committee members vote on the bill itself using ranked choice voting — an offer the Chair declined. The California RCV Coalition played a central role in defeating the bill, coordinating a broad coalition of good-government and civil rights organizations to oppose it. In a joint opposition letter to Chair Bryan, the following groups urged a "no" vote: the League of Women Voters of California, ACLU California Action, Voices for Progress, RepresentUs, FairVote Action, California Clean Money Campaign, Californians for Electoral Reform, Unite America, Independent Voter Project, Rank the Vote, Campaign Legal Center, and Bay Rising. Read the Coalition Opposition Letter The letter argued that AB 2808 would undermine voting rights, reduce turnout, roll back diversity gains in local representation, and undemocratically override the will of voters who adopted RCV by large margins in their cities. As noted in a CalMatters commentary from the mayors of Berkeley and Oakland, ranked choice voting offers more representative government at the city, county and state levels. Read the Sacramento Bee article on AB2808's failure

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín defend ranked choice voting against a 2022 Assembly bill that sought to ban it statewide. They write that RCV has served their cities since 2010 by saving money, improving turnout, and electing more women and people of color. The bill later died in the Assembly Elections Committee. Read the full piece at the San Jose Mercury News for more details.

A FairVote study of four elections in San Jose and Santa Clara County found that turnout among voters of color doubles from the primary to the general election, while White turnout rises only about 1.5 times. That means the current two-round contingent runoff system lets a smaller, less representative electorate shape the outcome. Ranked choice voting would combine the two rounds into a single, higher-turnout election. Read the full study summary at FairVote for more details.

On Wednesday, February 9th 2022, our panelists joined moderator Tom Charron of the California RCV Coalition to discuss the state of voting in California and our nation as a whole. Ranked Choice Voting provides a unique opportunity to increase voter choice at the ballot box and discourage the divisive political practices that have become standard in American politics. Our three panelists have unique insight into the problems with our current elections system and a passion for solving the crisis of America's ever-deepening political divide. Watch the event on YouTube: 00:00 - Intro 07:30 - Intro to RCV & impact on candidates running for office 31:30 - RCV from voters' point of view 40:53 - More benefits, including cost savings 47:45 - The impact of RCV in California cities so far 59:01 - Increased representation of minority voices 1:04:09 - Multi-winner RCV to achieve proportional representation 1:17:10 - How RCV can be adopted at the statewide level in California 1:25:50 - How multi-winner RCV can help ensure voting rights Andrew Yang is an author, former presidential candidate, and non-profit founder. In 2021, Yang founded the Forward Party PAC, which has a focus on electoral reform. Rob Richie is the co-founder and CEO of FairVote, a non-profit advancing Ranked Choice Voting and Proportional Representation across the United States. He is a frequent contributor to publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Maria Perez is Co-Founder and Co-Director of Democracy Rising, an organization that promotes democratic engagement and representative, accountable leadership. Perez previously served as FairVote's New Mexico director.

Key Findings from a report by FairVote & RepresentWomen published in 2016: More women and people of color in elected office. Since the introduction of RCV, women have won more than 40% of all contests, women of color have won almost a quarter of all contests and people of color have won 60 percent. People of color now hold 13 of the 18 seats in San Francisco elected by RCV, which is up from eight seats before RCV was adopted (although down from 15 of 18 seats after the 2010 RCV elections). Women won nine of 11 open seats in RCV elections in 2014, and, in Oakland, have gone from holding 10 seats after the 2008 elections to 13 seats today. More women and people of color are running and winning. In cities that introduced RCV, the percentage of candidates and winners among women, people of color, and women of color increased more (or declined less) than it did in a comparison group of similar cities that did not adopt RCV. Increase in the proportion of women in elected office. Our study of the effects of RCV shows that the introduction of RCV in California led to an increase in the proportion of women, and especially women of color, winning local political office. Increase in the percentage of people of color and women of color. RCV led to an increase in the percent of city council candidates who are people of color and women of color. These findings are robust and statistically significant. Our study controls for the impact of socio-economic factors (like educational attainment and the racial composition of the city), political factors (like partisanship and voter turnout), as well as electoral factors (incumbency and the use of term limits, and public financing). Read the report from FairVote & RepresentWomen.