Newsom nixes rankedchoice voting measure

To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the governor.

More than 17 years after San Francisco approved rankedchoice voting over the objections of thenSupervisor Gavin Newsom, California’s firstyear governor got a chance for some payback, vetoing a bill that would have allowed more cities, counties and school districts across the state to switch to the voting system.

The bill, SB212 by state Sen. Ben Allen, DSanta Monica, was overwhelmingly approved by both the state Senate and the Assembly. An analysis of the bill found no opposition.

That analysis missed one important opponent, however.

“Ranked choice is an experiment that has been tried in several charter cities in California,” Newsom said in his veto message Sunday. “Where it has been implemented, I am concerned that it

has often led to voter confusion and that the promise that rankedchoice voting leads to greater democracy is not necessarily fulfilled.”

Rankedchoice voting, also known as instant runoff, is designed to eliminate lowturnout December elections that occur when no candidate gets a majority of votes in the November general election. Instead, voters in November list multiple candidates on their ballots, ranking them in order of preference.

If no one receives a majority in the first count, the lowestranking candidate is dropped from the ballot, with their votes automatically going to that voter’s second choice. That continues until someone has 50% plus one of the vote.

Newsom hated the idea in 2002 and doesn’t like it much better today.

“The cure being proposed is far worse than the disease,” Newsom said as he joined a ballot argument against Proposition A in 2002, which brought rankedchoice elections to San Francisco. “We do not believe that the Board (of Supervisors) should be experimenting with San Franciscans’ hardfought right to vote. Primaries and runoff elections have served our nation well for most of its history.”

Sixteen years after San Francisco’s first rankedchoice election, the system is hardly an unknown in California. Oakland, Berkeley and San Leandro have used it since 2010.

But all those are charter cities, which can make their own election rules, unlike general law cities, counties and school districts, which follow a set of state regulations.

The bill that Newsom vetoed would have given “local jurisdictions access to solutions that charter cities are already using in California,” Allen, its author, said in a statement. It wouldn’t have imposed ranked choice, but simply provided “communities with more options.”

That wasn’t good enough for Newsom, who said, “The state would benefit from learning more from charter cities who use ranked choice voting before broadly expanding the system.”

But would more evidence change the governor’s mind?

During a campaign bus trip to San Jose last year, a reporter asked Newsom if he planned to take San Francisco’s rankedchoice experience statewide.

Newsom just rolled his eyes.