Irvine Considers Ranked-Choice Voting: Defining a 'Majority Winner'

Ranked-choice voting (RCV) is under consideration for future Irvine mayoral and City Council elections, with potential implementation beginning in 2028. This change would be subject to an applicable ballot measure and specific implementation requirements.

Advocates of RCV highlight its capacity to produce a winner with majority support. However, a majority of votes counted in the final round of an RCV election differs significantly from a majority of Irvine’s total registered voters.

Under RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate secures a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. The votes of the eliminated candidate are then redistributed to the voter's next available preference. This process continues until one candidate achieves the required majority among the remaining, or “continuing,” votes.

This method can identify a candidate preferred by a majority of voters whose ballots are active in the final round. However, it does not inherently increase voter turnout or engage an indifferent electorate. The system cannot convert a minority of registered voters into a majority through ballot redistribution alone.

Irvine’s 2022 mayoral election provides a local example of how a winner's vote count relates to the total electorate. In that election, Irvine had 153,389 registered voters. Of those, 84,663 ballots were cast, resulting in a turnout of 55.2%.

Farrah Khan won the mayoral race with 29,628 votes. This total represented 19.3% of Irvine’s registered voters, meaning fewer than one in five registered voters cast a ballot for the winning candidate. Additionally, 7.5% of ballots cast in the election left the mayoral race blank. Over 123,000 registered voters did not vote for Khan.

Even with RCV, if only a portion of the electorate participates, the winning candidate will still emerge from that smaller pool. For instance, if 153,389 registered voters exist but only 75,000 ballots are cast, an RCV winner with 40,000 votes in the final round would represent a majority of the ballots still being counted, but only 26.1% of the registered electorate.

Should ballots become exhausted because voters did not rank any remaining candidates, the final-round vote total can further decrease. In such a scenario, a candidate might achieve a majority of the votes still actively counted while receiving support from an even smaller share of the original registered electorate.

It is important to distinguish between three distinct measures of electoral support: a majority of votes cast in the final round, a majority of all ballots originally cast, and a majority of all registered voters. These are not interchangeable measures.

If Irvine adopts RCV, residents would benefit from clear and comprehensive reporting from election officials that extends beyond just the final winner and their percentage of the final-round vote. Such detailed reporting would allow residents to independently assess the scope of a winning candidate's support within the entire city.

The consideration of RCV for future Irvine elections, potentially starting in 2028, hinges on a ballot measure and requires meeting various implementation requirements.