Former Oakland City Councilman Loren Taylor trails former Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) by about 5,000 votes, according to the latest election results posted Friday by the Alameda County Elections Office. However, even though the election was held last Tuesday, officials have not yet received all ballots, let alone counted them. This means there is plenty of room for Lee, the Democratic Party machine favorite, to find sufficient votes to win.
Oakland does not normally hold mayoral elections in April of odd-numbered years, but former Mayor Sheng Thao was recalled by voters after being indicted by the Department of Justice on bribery charges stemming from the award of waste disposal contracts for the city.
Thao narrowly beat Taylor in November 2022 by 677 votes after seven rounds of ranked choice voting. Thao’s victory is a case study of why ranked choice voting is an abomination of democracy that should be repealed in every jurisdiction where the Democratic Party has installed it.
The theory behind ranked choice voting is that by allowing voters to rank their candidates in order of preference, more “moderate” candidates, who can’t command a majority on their own, are more likely to prevail as more “extreme” candidates who have a rabid following that would help them win in a low-turnout primary with many candidates.
For example, in a field with one extreme candidate and three moderates, the extreme candidate could take one-third of the vote, but if the moderates split the other two-thirds of the vote evenly, then the extreme candidate would win 33% to 22% to 22% to 22%, even though most voters chose a moderate candidate. Supporters of choice voting say the system discourages negative campaigning because candidates have an incentive to appeal to supporters of other candidates, not just their own.
In practice, this is not what ranked choice voting delivers. Instead, what we get is a system in which party insiders attack one outsider candidate, making the party favorite more likely to pick up most votes by the time all the ranked choices are counted.
This is what happened to Taylor in November 2022. He was ahead of Thao in the first round by more than 1,600 votes. If Oakland had not adopted ranked choice voting, Taylor would have won, Thao would have lost, and the city would not have had a corrupt mayor arrested and then ousted.
However, Oakland has ranked choice voting, and government unions and nonprofit organizations that own the Democratic Party spent heavily demonizing Taylor during the campaign. Because of this, Thao pulled ahead in the eighth round and held on to it despite Taylor holding his lead through the first seven rounds of voting. In other words, despite Taylor being the voters’ choice for mayor through seven rounds, the Democratic machine installed its favored candidate.
Voters should not have more than one vote in an election. The more candidates a voter chooses, the more votes they effectively get in a ranked choice election. A voter who likes only one candidate and does not want to vote for any others gets just one vote. If their candidate is eliminated in the first round, the voter is effectively eliminated too. However, another voter who is indifferent between candidates and ranks all in order gets a vote in every round of the ranked choice runoff. In the 2022 race, there were more than 11,000 ballots that did not rank all the candidates and therefore had less say in the outcome than those that did. The Democrat machine makes sure all its voters don’t make the mistake of voting only for who they like, thus multiplying union and activist chances.
It is beyond absurd and calculatedly undemocratic that Oakland does not have its final vote count already in and probably won’t for months. The source of the problem extends beyond ranked choice voting. Unlike Florida, which delivers results on election night by requiring all mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, California requires only a postmark by Election Day, and votes are allowed to trickle in for weeks later.
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“This is ridiculous,” Oakland resident Justin Berton told the San Francisco Chronicle. “All this waiting is bad for the candidates, it’s bad for the constituents, and it’s really bad for democracy.”
Berton is right. Oakland’s voting system is a travesty of democracy. Ranked choice voting and counting ballots received after an election must be abandoned to restore faith in the system.
