How Does Ranked Choice Voting Work?

If you’re an Oakland resident, Tuesday is your last day to vote for a new mayor, new city council member and whether to approve Measure A, which would increase the city’s sales tax by 0.5%.

Your ballot for the special election will use a system known as “ranked choice voting” for the mayoral and city council races.

But how does ranked choice voting work in elections like these? Do you have to rank every candidate in a race? And what happens if you rank your first choice multiple times?

Keep reading for what you need to know about ranked choice voting.  You can also read more information about how to vote in Oakland’s special election.

• Jump straight to: Do I have to fill in all the rankings available?

In a nutshell, how does ranked choice voting work on my ballot?

Without ranked choice voting, your ballot will ask you to pick your No. 1 choice of candidate for a particular office — and that’s it.

Ranked choice voting allows you to pick your first choice candidate, followed by your second choice, your third choice and so on.

How this looks on your ballot: the candidates will be listed with columns next to the names that say “First Choice,” “Second Choice,” “Third Choice,” etc. Next to your first choice candidate’s name, you’ll fill in the oval in the “First Choice” column. You can then repeat the process for your second choice and third choice until you’ve completed all the rankings you want to give.

How are the votes then counted for those candidates?

Every voter’s first choices are counted — and if a single candidate gets more than 50% of everybody’s first choice votes, they win outright.

But if no majority winner emerges from that first count of all the first choice votes, under ranked choice voting, the race then moves through several rounds of counting until a winner emerges:

• The candidate who got the fewest first choice votes is eliminated first;
• Voters who ranked that candidate as their first choice then have those votes count for their second choice instead;
• And so on, and so on, until one candidate has a majority.

This video breaks it down:

@kqednews ♬ original sound – KQED News

How many rankings do I get on my ballot?

It depends on what ballot you have — what county or city you live in and what race is being voted on.

In San Francisco, the 2024 mayoral race offered you ten spots to rank the 13 candidates. In the 2024 Berkeley mayoral race, the ballot had five rankings available for five candidates.

Do I have to fill in all the available rankings? Can’t I just vote for my top candidate and leave it at that?

You can rank as many — or as few — candidates as you would like, as allowed by your ballot.

If your first choice candidate in a race is polling ahead of their challengers because they’ll probably be the first choice of many other voters, it’s unlikely that person would be eliminated until the final round. In that scenario, your second choice vote wouldn’t even be counted. This is one scenario in which voters might choose to only rank their first choice candidate.

But in most other cases, if your first choice candidate is eliminated and you didn’t rank an additional second, third or fourth choice candidate you’d be effectively giving up your say in who else — beyond your first choice — should advance in the race.

And if there’s a candidate you really don’t want to see elected, remember: you don’t have to include them in your rankings at all (as opposed to say, ranking them last.)

What happens if I just rank my top candidate as my first choice, my second choice and my third choice?

Ranking your top candidate more than once does not help them. In this scenario, if your first choice is knocked out, your second and third candidates can’t be counted — because they were the same as your first choice.

“So you missed some influence in the rounds of voting because at some point you have no more choices,” Lisa Bryant, associate professor and chair of the political science department at California State University, Fresno, told KQED in 2024. “And they can’t tabulate [your first choice] for four additional rounds where that person no longer exists in the running.

“Some people might consider that a wasted vote,” she said.

What’s the benefit of ranking several candidates this way?

Ultimately, Bryant said, “The idea behind ranked choice voting is that even if you didn’t get your first choice, you were more likely to get somebody that wasn’t your last choice.”

In what Bryant called a “hyper-polarized” election climate, she said that according to ranked choice voting advocates, this system can give voters “more of a reason to vote for people, and to look for the positives and to look at what their platforms actually look like.”

Ranked choice voting also eliminates the need for second, runoff elections — usually held a month later — when a clear winner did not emerge from the first election.

Not only are special elections “really expensive, especially in California,” Bryant said, “unless you have two really charismatic [candidates] and a really contentious race going on, it doesn’t really drive turnout the way a general election does.”

This story contains reporting by KQED’s Scott Shafer.