‘Tis the season for endorsements and, with the Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) system — also known as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) — making its San Francisco debut this fall, local organizations are choosing endorsees differently than they have in the past. Now that voters have three choices on the ballot instead of one, organizations like the Harvey Milk Democratic Club and the San Francisco Tenants Union are using ranked choice voting techniques to make endorsements.
RCV will be used at the polls to determine the city’s seven supervisor seats for the first time this year, so it’s not surprising that organizations employ varying methods for endorsing candidates. The Center for Voting and Democracy’s Steven Hill offers standard guidelines for organizations making endorsements in RCV elections (www.sfrcv.com), but strategic concerns, political alliances and organizational ideals also have their place in determining endorsees this year.
When the Harvey Milk Democratic Club began its endorsement process, it followed Hill’s guidelines. In Districts 5 and 9, Robert Haaland and Tom Ammiano, respectively, won over 90 percent of club members’ votes in the first round. Given both candidates’ close relationship to the club, the result was no surprise.
In other districts, the club used RCV to determine endorsees, but the second and third slots for several districts remain empty. Instead of voting for less desirable candidates as second and third choices, many voters chose no candidate instead.
“No one made 60 percent, and the no candidate in many cases hit that 60 percent,” said Michael Goldstein, the club’s president.
While focusing support behind one candidate makes the most sense with traditional voting systems, Hill emphasizes the advantages of ranked choices with RCV.
“I think it’s best for organizations to tell voters, ‘Use all your rankings,'” Hill said, because listing the same candidate for all three choices will not help that candidate win. Nor will it help voters’ preferences enter the public sphere. Essentially, putting the same name in all three voting slots, a strategy called bullet voting, is equivalent to voting in the November election, but failing to vote in the December runoff. If that sounds confusing, Hill’s flash animation feature on www.sfrcv.org demystifies the process.
According to Hill, ranking candidates during the endorsement process “mirrors what voters are going to have to do on election day.” Ranking also gives organizations the chance to express nuanced political preferences. With less pressure to back a likely winner for strategic reasons, organizations have more incentive to endorse weaker candidates whose messages better reflect their ideals.
The San Francisco Tenants Union endorsed Anita Grier for District 11, even though its members consider incumbent Gerardo Sandoval more likely to win the election. Tenants Union voting members chose Grier simply because her ideas more closely reflect their own, said Ted Gullickson. If RCV were not happening this fall, the Tenants Union would have kept its weight behind Sandoval, a strong candidate sympathetic to tenants’ issues, though not the Tenants Union’s ideal leader.
“If there had been no IRV, there would have been no endorsement question,” Gullickson said. He added that the new system opens the door for voters to choose the “pure person over the person who has been mediocre but stands a realistic chance of winning.”
Using RCV to make endorsements also reduces the “funny business” that Hill said could accompany club voting rounds. In the past, if no candidate received the two-thirds majority necessary to win an endorsement, a runoff became necessary. Candidates able to rally supporters and convince them to return to the club for a second vote had a distinct advantage over candidates who, for whatever reason, failed to attract as many supporters the second time around.
“Suddenly all the candidates are on their cell phones calling all their supporters saying, ‘Come back down here and vote,'” Hill says. Using RCV to determine endorsees eliminates this danger.
The only consistently mentioned drawback to RCV in the endorsement process was time, though Hill said the process took no more time than traditional voting had in the past. Depending on a club’s membership numbers, counting votes in an instant runoff situation can be tedious. Clubs usually count ballots several times to make sure results are accurate. If no candidate receives enough votes to win the endorsement, then the ballots must be resorted before the runoff so that ballots listing the third place candidate as their first choice can be pulled and re-counted according to their second choice. In the ensuing runoff election, the ballots will then be counted several more times for accuracy.
The process this year took hours at the Harvey Milk Club. Even so, Goldstein said the slow pace might become less of an issue in future elections.
“This is the first time we’ve done IRV with a real IRV happening. I think it’s going to get easier as time goes on,” he said.
At the Tenants Union, Gullickson said he worried the endorsement process would be time consuming because the organization requires a unanimous consensus before endorsements are final.
“It turned out to be easier than expected to come to a consensus on the IRV slots,” he said. But that could have more to do with the particular candidates in each district than the process itself, Gullickson suggested. This year, at least, Tenants Union members were able to agree on their endorsees without much debate.
When it comes to candidates, the RCV process can mean more endorsements, even if some of those come as organization’s suggestions for second and third choice candidates. District 5 candidate Robert Haaland wasn’t phased by the prospect of ranked endorsements.
“You just try to generate support with the organizations and you do your best, and sometimes you’re number one and sometimes you’re number three,” he said.
With candidates pulling in endorsements as an organization’s first, second or third choices, voters may wonder exactly which endorsement slot a candidate has won from an organization issuing multiple endorsements. For now, there is no standard system, and candidates are free to choose how to present their endorsements in their campaign materials.
“Some of the endorsements are single and some are ranked,” Haaland said. “If I’m the first ranked choice, I just list it as the endorsement.”
Organizations also have the freedom to handle their endorsements in any way they choose. Some rank candidates one through three, some designate a first choice and then offer two unranked alternatives.
How organizations make endorsements and how candidates use them will change as campaigns and voters digest RCV in the coming years. For now, Hill urges voters to rank, rank, rank. After all, now that you have three choices, why not use them?
You can reach Lorraine Sanders at lorraine@lorrainsanders.com.
