Officials weigh future tallying methods
Council defers decision on ranked choice voting, schedules workshop
San Bernardino leaders hesitated Wednesday to throw their full support behind ranked choice voting in future elections, but a majority of them did agree to schedule a workshop to learn more about the multistepped method of tallying votes.
It is unclear at the moment when that conference will occur.
Councilmembers Sandra Ibarra, Ben Reynoso, Kimberly Calvin and Damon Alexander favored hosting such a forum.
Councilmembers Theodore Sanchez, Juan Figueroa and Fred Shorett opposed.
“We have be able to step away from what’s been when there are examples of things that work better,” implored Reynoso, who said he recently watched his distant cousin Antonio Reynoso win election as Brooklyn Borough president via ranked choice voting.
“In a society like this, democratic, we’re trying things,” he added. “This thing’s an experiment. Society, this is not a full-on democracy, this is an experiment.”
Shorett could not have disagreed more.
“This seems quite confusing,” he said. “There seems to not be a groundswell of people doing this. My understanding is cities that have tried this realized it wasn’t as good as they thought. This is beyond our control. This goes back to elementary school where our schools are failing us in not teaching democracy and teaching the importance of voting.”
Ranked choice voting, or RCV, allows voters to rank candidates for office in order of preference when marking their ballots.
A candidate wins election outright with a majority — 50% plus one — of first-choice votes.
In the event that threshold is not met, the candidate with the fewest firstchoice votes is eliminated from contention. At that point, the ballots cast in favor of that candidate are revisited to tally the secondchoice votes on those tickets, and those votes are awarded to the remaining candidates.
Vote totals are examined
again to determine whether a majority was reached.
The process of elimination is repeated until a winner emerges.
In San Bernardino, transitioning to ranked choice voting requires a charter amendment, giving voters the final say on how they want to elect their representatives.
All city leaders can do is direct staffers to craft a ballot measure and agree to pose the question to voters.
Should the council reach that point, an extensive educational campaign is needed to explain ranked choice voting to the public, councilmembers agreed Wednesday.
“I don’t want to confuse voters,” Ibarra commented. “I want them to know how to vote and encourage them to vote.”
San Francisco and Oakland are among the handful of California cities to use ranked choice voting.
San Bernardino would be the first city in the county to use it.
Under current state law, only charter counties and cities, such as San Bernardino, can adopt ranked choice voting. General law jurisdictions cannot.
Wednesday, Sanchez suggested proponents of ranked choice voting gather the requisite number of signatures to qualify a measure for the ballot.
“This can happen without council action,” Sanchez said.
Shorett lambasted the entire proposal, saying he would not attend any such workshop.
“Voting needs to be taken a little more seriously,” he said. “We need to be promoting the idea of the privilege it is to be able to vote, and that’s not happening. We’re making it easier and easier and easier for people to be lazier and lazier and lazier.”