Irvine will explore a ranked choice voting system for future city council and mayoral races.
In traditional elections, voters mark their ballots for one candidate per seat. What a slim majority of the Irvine City Council has agreed to look at is having voters rank candidates for an office in order of preference, with last-place candidates being eliminated until one candidate receives more than 50% of the votes.
Efforts to allow ranked choice voting in California were shot down in 2007 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and in 2019 by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Having its own charter, or city constitution, enabling more control over its local elections means Irvine “has the ability to transition to ranked choice voting without processing a charter amendment — that means, without having a public vote,” Irvine City Attorney Jeff Melching said.
After some back-and-forth on the dais, the City Council voted 4-3 on Tuesday, April 28, to ask the city attorney to present by May 15 a draft ordinance and cost analysis for implementing ranked choice voting.
Mayor Larry Agran and councilmembers James Mai and Mike Carroll were opposed.
Earlier this month, councilmembers Betty Martinez-Franco, Kathleen Treseder and Melinda Liu sent the city manager a letter, outlining their request to initiate the discussion, saying ranked choice voting “eliminates ‘spoiler effects’ and ensures that winners have the broadest possible support from the community,” promotes civil discourse and voter engagement, and allows residents to “vote for their favorite candidate first without worrying they are ‘wasting’ their vote.”
Ranked choice voting would also “help circumvent” negative campaigning and “allow people to vote for the people they like most,” instead of who they like least, Treseder later added.
“And sometimes if the elections come down to two or three percentage points, if they can run a spoiler candidate that can pull away 3% or 4% of a vote, they’ve got it. And I don’t think that is in the best interest of the public,” Treseder said. “Those of us who are close to the elections know who the spoilers are and who’s doing it, but the public at large wouldn’t necessarily know.”
But Mai argued the process could be too complicated.
“We want to bring more people to the voter boxes and to mail in their votes, not to intimidate or confuse them,” he said. “My biggest thing is that for the regular voter, if you survey them, I think they would be confused.”
Carroll agreed, adding “I think ranked choice voting is well intentioned,” but “there’s practical consequences that are still being sorted out. I think it’s costly.”
Martinez Franco said the move is about “giving Irvine voters more choice.”
“I like the fact that we can rank all of our candidates and we have that choice, but for those who are purists and want one candidate and one vote, they can still do that,” she said. “It’s a choice for everybody.”
The voting machines currently used by the OC Registrar of Voters, which administers elections in the county, don’t allow for ranked choice voting, but if the city decides to green light and implement ranked choice voting, “the expectation is voting machines will allow for ranked choice voting by November 2028,” Melching said.