Judicial Overreach: Judge Forces Huntington Beach into Ranked-Choice Voting Experiment

Orange County Superior Court Judge Craig L. Griffin has single-handedly upended the entire City Council election system of Huntington Beach. With one ruling, he has ordered the city to abandon its long standing at-large elections, impose ranked-choice voting, and consolidate all seven council seats onto a single ballot every four years. That a solitary judge can rewrite how an entire municipality chooses its government should astonish anyone who still believes in the constitutional allocation of power. Elections are the province of state legislatures, local elected officials, and the voters themselves, not courts.

The June 2026 tentative decision in Southwest Voter Registration Education Project et al. v. City of Huntington Beach finds that the city’s at-large system violates the California Voting Rights Act by diluting Latino voting strength through “racially polarized voting.” Latinos make up roughly 19–20 percent of the city’s population of about 200,000 and about 16.4 percent of eligible voters. Plaintiffs—the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and activist Victor Valladares, represented by attorney Kevin Shenkman—sued in May 2024. Judge Griffin rejected district elections as too disruptive to the city charter’s at-large requirement and instead mandated multi-winner ranked-choice voting as a “less drastic remedy.” He also ordered an end to staggered terms, which could cut short the four-year terms of several sitting council members if the change takes effect for the November 2026 election (or 2028 if the Orange County Registrar of Voters cannot implement it sooner).

Huntington Beach is fighting back, pointing out that the Registrar lacks a state-certified system for ranked-choice voting and would need expensive software upgrades. The city further argues that the race-centered rationale collides with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which constrained the use of race in electoral remedies. Yet the deeper outrage is structural: a court has now dictated the fundamental architecture of local elections. Under the U.S. Constitution, the times, places, and manner of holding elections are primarily left to the states (Article I, Section 4). Local governments, as creatures of state law and city charters, further refine those rules through elected bodies accountable to the people. Courts exist to resolve disputes and protect individual rights, not to redesign democratic processes wholesale when outcomes displease particular interest groups.

Ranked-choice voting itself remains an unpopular and almost completely unused form of balloting. It operates in roughly fifty jurisdictions, mostly mid-sized cities, and statewide in only two places, Maine and Alaska. The overwhelming majority of American elections still use traditional plurality systems. Voters have repeatedly rejected ranked-choice measures at the ballot box, often by decisive margins, and numerous states have banned it. Its complexity, ballot exhaustion, delayed results, and potential to produce winners who lack broad first-choice support make it a poor default for any city, let alone one imposed by judicial fiat.

Advocates cast the order as a cure for “voter suppression.” That claim invites a more basic inquiry the court largely ignored: are the voters whose influence is allegedly being suppressed actually legal U.S. citizens eligible to vote? California’s voter rolls have faced repeated questions about non-citizen registrations. Federal reviews have identified hundreds of thousands of potential non-citizen entries nationwide, with California accounting for a large share. Huntington Beach has itself defended measures to verify eligibility, including identification requirements, precisely because clean rolls are the foundation of legitimate representation. Changing how preferences are tallied does nothing to ensure that only eligible citizens are participating. If the electorate itself is compromised, rearranging the counting method merely rearranges a flawed process.

That a single judge can scrap a city’s established election system and install an experimental alternative should set off constitutional alarm bells. Elected officials and the people they represent, not the judiciary, are charged with determining how elections are conducted. Judge Griffin’s ruling continues a troubling pattern under the California Voting Rights Act in which courts remake local democracy according to group outcomes rather than equal individual citizenship. Whether ranked-choice voting will deliver the promised results is secondary. The more fundamental injury is to the separation of powers and the principle that the people, through their elected representatives, set the rules of self-government.

Huntington Beach is expected to keep fighting, and it should.