Ranked-choice voting in San Francisco is supposed to be pretty damn simple. You get X number of candidates, and you line ‘em up from first to worst. Heck, it’s been the norm for mayoral races here since 2007.
Lately, though, the two richest and most active political groups in the city are giving their followers specific instructions on how to rank candidates — not just to give their favored candidates a boost, but to game the system against their boogeyman, progressive candidate and current Supervisor Aaron Peskin.
Apparently, it’s not enough to spend millions of dollars to flood the city with rhetoric about how radical leftists like Peskin and District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston have, somehow, single-handedly destroyed San Francisco. Now, they have to make sure their supporters don’t accidentally open the door for Peskin to sneak into the ranked-choice finals.
In a recent email endorsement, the billionaire-backed group Neighbors for a Better SF strayed from its usual tough-on-crime rhetoric to give out explicit voting instructions to its supporters, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle.
“It is our recommendation that our members vote for all three leading moderate candidates. Under no circumstances should you vote for Aaron Peskin anywhere on your ballot,” the email reportedly said. “To vote for less than all three candidates will increase the likelihood Aaron Peskin could win, which we consider the worst possible outcome for San Francisco.”
That seems sensible, right? They love all the moderates! Except, wait — they only endorsed two candidates: law-and-order fan Mark Farrell, and Levi’s heir Daniel Lurie. In the same email, they essentially called Breed a failure. “We do not believe she has demonstrated an ability to govern,” the email said — then proceeded to tell their supporters to put her on the ballot.
The message clearly implies the voter base should only care about Breed as a roadblock for Peskin, rather than, you know…as the third-best candidate. (Also, shoutout to poor Ahsha Safaí, who isn’t even being mentioned, as a roadblock or otherwise.)
TogetherSF, a so-called “moderate” political group which pushes for crackdowns on drug users and funded the infamous "Fentalife" ad campaign mocking the deadly opioid crisis, also made a very similar argument on a video disseminated on social media last month.
SF uses ranked choice voting to decide elections, and that’s a good thing—mostly.
— TogetherSF Action (@TSFAction) June 7, 2024
But ranked choice voting has some quirks, so you need to know the details.
We explain exactly how it works. With emojis. pic.twitter.com/1KBrpWenSd
Neighbors for a Better San Francisco and TogetherSF are separate groups, but an investigation by the Guardian and Mission Local traced how the two — helmed by a husband and wife team, Jay Cheng and Kanishka Cheng — are part of a “grey money” network funneling billionaires’ cash toward overlapping political goals. (A third billionaire-backed group in the network, GrowSF, has also been slamming Peskin as part of a broader anti-progressive slate, financed largely by wealthy tech executives like Chris Larsen and Garry Tan.)
In the TogetherSF video, a narrator describes ranked-choice as “a good thing — mostly,” then goes on to demonstrate how a trailing “poop emoji” candidate could win with a minority of the vote, if it weren’t left off voters’ ballots entirely.
Ultimately, the video argues, voters should leave off anyone from the ballot that they “can’t stand,” lest they give Peskin — erm, Mr. Poop Emoji — a chance to win. A little more subtle than the explicit recommendation from Neighbors for a Better SF, perhaps, but not by much.
Deb Otis, director of research and policy at FairVote, didn’t buy TogetherSF’s “poop emoji” video, noting that its premise is based on a “wildly unrealistic hypothetical” and a strange framing of ranked-choice intentions.
In one of the silliest quotes ever included in a story about hard politics, Otis told Gazetteer that the message makes little sense. “The video itself is showing how popular the poop emoji is, but then also claims that it’s the worst candidate,” she said.
Ranked-choice voting was introduced to eliminate the need for a primary or runoff elections, while addressing some of the downsides of so-called “plurality” voting, in which each voter selects one candidate, and whomever has the most votes wins outright.
In the ranked choice system, which has governed most SF races since 2004, voters are instead asked to list candidates in order of preference. If anyone wins an outright majority, the game is over. If not, the person with the fewest votes is ejected from the running, and those votes are “redistributed” to the other candidates based on how those voters ranked the other candidates. This repeats in successive “rounds,” until somebody is left with more than 50% support.
Ranked choice encourages candidates to appeal to a broad group of voters, and may improve voter satisfaction long-term because of it, proponents argue. In theory, it makes people less likely to vote for the candidates who seem most electable, rather than their actual favorites. Indeed, research from FairVote, a voting-reform organization that advocates for ranked choice elections, suggests that ranked choice voting dramatically increases the number of ballots that directly affect the outcome of closely contested races.
Despite her criticism of the video, Otis told Gazetteer that the seeming collaboration in SF to push a voting strategy should be expected; ranked-choice voting naturally encourages coalition-building, she said.
“This is a feature, not a bug,” she said. “Everyone’s trying to appeal to a majority of voters, and there’s a focus on shared values over mudslinging between ideologically similar candidates.”
Other experts see it differently. Larry Jacobs, professor and director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, wrote in a recent white paper that ranked-choice voting has failed to reduce political sniping and polarization. He doesn’t support what Neighbors for a Better SF and TogetherSF are doing.
“This kind of gaming violates the purpose of RCV, which is to expand the voice of voters to express their preferences for candidates and stop the ‘wasted vote’ traps of today,” he said.
Jim Campbell, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Buffalo, also drew a blunt line, telling Gazetteer, “It’s clearly not in the spirit of the system.”
“The idea of ranked-choice voting was to take ‘strategic’ voting off the table, so that people could simply vote sincerely and then an algorithmic process would come up with an optimal collective choice that creates a majority,” he said.
None of this may matter, in the end: Peskin was lagging far behind in a recent poll. Still, it’s telling that the city’s most monied and influential political donors seem terrified of an ambush from him on Election Day. In the war against progressives, it seems like they’ll leverage everything they can — even the voting system itself — to ensure a win for one of the two ultra-rich white guys they love most.
