Getting your
Trinity Audioplayer ready...Alameda County is wasting months and millions of dollars on a runoff to choose a replacement for ex-Rep. Eric Swalwell for the rest of his term. The June 16 ballot for Swalwell’s District 14 seat had 11 candidates, with no one clearing the 50% needed to avoid an August 18 runoff. Preliminary results have the leader, State Sen. Aisha Wahab, with about 43% of the vote. The winner of the runoff will occupy the seat for only a couple months until January, when the November election winner will take the seat for the next term.
The combination of a likely low runoff turnout and lots of candidates means that the elected replacement is likely to win with a small minority of eligible votes, and could plausibly be among the candidates least preferred by District 14 voters.
It does not have to be this way.
With ranked choice voting, or RCV, we could fill the seat in a single election — with a candidate who has both broad and deep voter support.
California counties pay for expensive special elections. Santa Clara County’s December 2025 runoff for county assessor cost more than $10 million. Ranked choice voting makes the second election unnecessary because RCV has an instant runoff (that is why it is also called instant-runoff voting).
Special elections are notorious for poor turnout, and runoffs are worse. Special elections draw roughly half the turnout of general elections; runoffs typically draw about half of that. The Santa Clara assessor runoff finished with about 20% turnout, meaning the winner was chosen by a sliver of the electorate. Research consistently shows the steepest turnout drops are among younger voters and Latino voters, the very groups already underrepresented at the polls.
Is a contest decided by one in five eligible voters really the best we can do?
Flawed outcomes
Now consider how the winner is selected. With 11 candidates, seven Democrats and three Republicans plus an independent, the Democratic vote was split several ways, with the next highest vote-getters, both Democrats, having about 17% and 13% of the vote. Under California’s top-two system, that means only two Democrats, and no Republican, will be on the August runoff ballot.
This is not new, and sometimes it is two candidates of the minority party who advance. In 2012, California’s heavily Democratic 31st Congressional District sent only two Republicans to the November ballot because four Democrats split the primary vote almost evenly. A majority Democratic district ended up choosing between two candidates a majority of its voters had actively voted against. In 2022, six Republican candidates in solidly Republican state Senate District 4 split 59% of the vote, sending only two Democrats to the November ballot.
The District 14 runoff race is no outlier. Since California adopted top-two in 2012, there have been special election runoffs for 11 state Assembly, eight state Senate and four congressional seats. That does not count the dozens of city and county special-election runoffs.
These are the precise scenarios that let a top-two system elevate the least preferred candidates. When like-minded voters are split across many names, fringe candidates can advance with a small but consolidated base. Ranked choice voting prevents this. If your first choice can’t win, your ballot transfers to your second choice. Your voice is not wasted, and vote-splitting cannot hand the seat to a candidate the majority opposes.
Vacant seats
The Swalwell district also loses their voice in Washington for two months while waiting for the runoff. The gap between the June primary and August runoff leaves the 14th District’s house seat vacant during a period when a razor-thin Republican majority is moving major legislation. East Bay residents lose their vote in Congress for the duration.
Adopting ranked choice voting for California’s special elections would save counties millions, fill vacant seats months sooner and produce winners who actually reflect majority preference. Voters in Alameda County deserve a system that does not waste their time and money.
It is not just special elections where adopting ranked choice voting would save money and select winners in higher turnout elections. Currently, California’s standard elections use a primary where the top two vote-getters in a low turnout election advance to a November runoff. This could be changed to advancing five instead of two, then doing an instant runoff in November with ranked choice voting. This solves a slew of problems, while avoiding returning to partisan primaries where more partisan candidates are selected in low turnout elections.
For starters, most races have fewer than five candidates, so with top-five there would be no primary. That means candidates would be less beholden to special interests since no money is needed for a primary campaign. Plus, we voters wouldn’t be bombarded with political ads until November. We’d also avoid the current risk of vote-splitting leading to two candidates of the same party on the November ballot. Top-five would give third parties a chance to be on the ballot in November. It would ensure that the November election, with traditionally twice the turnout of the primary, would have more choices for the majority of voters.
It is time for our county supervisors and our state legislators to make the change to ranked-choice voting.
Paul Haughey is the board director at CalRCV, a nonprofit which advocates for ranked choice voting across the state.