The Left Pushing Ranked Choice Voting Scheme in Sacramento Political Races

Better Ballot Sacramento, a recent initiative of the League of Women Voters, is campaigning to bring ranked-choice voting to Sacramento’s mayor and city council races. They are now gathering signatures to get a ranked choice voting measure on the ballot.

Why? What’s wrong with the current voting system?

They claim it is “to replace costly primaries with a single, majority-winner election.”

And that’s where their claim breaks down. It’s not cost al all they care about; it’s power and control, and pushing the candidates they want.

Elsewhere across the country, “the ranked-choice voting racket is finally being recognized as a massive fraud — and voters are rejecting it nationwide,” the NY Post reported.

“It is called ranked choice voting (or “instant runoff voting”)—but it is really a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow candidates with marginal support from voters to win elections,” the Hans Von Spakovsky and J. Adams explain at the Heritage Foundation. “In the end, it is all about political power, not about what is best for the American people and for preserving our great republic. So-called reformers want to change process rules so they can manipulate election outcomes to obtain power.”

Well said.

The NY Post continues:

“In recent years, numerous states and cities, including New York City, have enacted ranked-choice voting, which forces voters to ditch the tried-and-true system of voting for one candidate. Instead, they have to list every candidate from favorite to least favorite.”

“If no candidate gets a majority, then bureaucrats divvy up people’s backup choices until someone clears 50%.”

If no candidate gets more than 50% on the first count, the lowest performing candidate is eliminated and their supporter’s next choices are counted until someone gets a majority.

What a crock. Ranked choice voting is a scheme to disconnect elections from issues and allow candidates with marginal support from voters to win.

It also disenfranchises voters, because ballots that do not include the two ultimate finalists are cast aside to manufacture a faux majority for the winner.

Ranked choice voting is already used in six California cities: Albany, Berkeley, Oakland, Redondo Beach, San Francisco, and San Leandro.

If you still aren’t sure, Better Ballot Sacramento is made up of these leftist groups:

Better Ballot Sacramento is a coalition of community organizations supporting Ranked Choice Voting for Sacramento’s local elections, including the League of Women Voters of Sacramento County; the Democratic Party of Sacramento County; local labor organizations such as the Sacramento Central Labor Council AFL-CIO and SEIU Local 1021; and the Black American Political Association of California-Sacramento Chapter (BAPAC); Sacramento’s local Indivisible chapter; the Sacramento Area Black Caucus (SABC); and community nonprofits like MENTOR California, Improve Your Tomorrow, Inc., and EBAYC Sacramento;

It’s curious that Better Ballot Sacramento is campaigning to bring ranked-choice voting to Sacramento’s mayor and city council races now, since there are no Republicans in any of the seats. The only conclusion is that they want to determine election outcomes.

According to RCV, a 2025 assessment from the Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center reveals that California is well-positioned to implement ranked choice voting (RCV) statewide, with 98% of counties already using RCV-capable voting equipment.​

Heritage explains how it works:

“In 2008, instead of choosing to cast your ballot for John McCain, Barack Obama, Ralph Nader, Bob Barr, or Cynthia McKinney, all of whom were running for president, you would vote for all of them and rank your choice. In other words, you would list all five candidates on your ballot from one to five, with one being your first choice for president and five being your last choice.

“If none of the candidates were chosen as the number one pick by a majority of voters in Round One, then the presidential candidate with the lowest number of votes would be eliminated from the ballot. People who selected that candidate as their top pick—let us say it was McKinney—would automatically have their votes changed to their second choice. Then the scores would be recalculated, over and over again, until one of the candidates finally won a majority as the second, third, or even fourth choice of voters.

“In the end, a voter’s ballot might wind up being cast for the candidate he ranked far below his first choice—a candidate to whom he may have strong political objections and for whom he would not vote in a traditional voting system.”

So you see it’s not really your choice at all.

“If a voter only ranks two of the five candidates and those two are eliminated in the first and second rounds of tabulation, their choices will not be considered in the remaining rounds of tabulation. This “ballot exhaustion” leads to candidates being elected who were not the first choice of a majority of voters, but only a majority of “all valid votes in the final round of tallying.” Thus, “it is possible that the winning candidate will fall short of an actual majority,” eliminating the “influence [of many voters] over the final outcome.”

The supporters of Better Ballot Sacramento should have read the Heritage Foundation report – that’s the debate we should be having. Because apparently they are fine with a ranked choice election boiling down to only two opposing candidates with many voters not having cast ballots for either of those two choices.

“That voter ends up with no say in the contest between the final two candidates in the black box elections governed by ranked choice voting.”

Their final warning: Beware anyone who wants to tinker with the long-standing electoral institutions, “whether that is the people controlling redistricting, voter registration, citizen-only voting, or the Electoral College.”

“Most of the time, when fundamental transformations to elections are proposed, the people proposing them have two characteristics. First, they think it will help their side win. Second, their ideological perspectives are usually rooted in a transformational extreme: They want to change the rules to manipulate elections outcomes in order to force the public into their distorted vision of a supposedly utopian society.

“Foes of the Electoral College, for example, want to undo it because they want large, densely populated cities with their one-party control over election administration determining who becomes the President of the United States. Foes of legislatures drawing district lines oppose the people having control over the process because they want friendly bureaucrats who sit on ‘independent’ redistricting commissions and who are unaccountable to voters drawing lines instead.”

Ouch. We just went through that. Voter beware.