SANTA CLARA COUNTY officials aren’t killing the idea of ranked-choice voting — they just need to sort out an “existential crisis” before seismically shifting Silicon Valley elections.
Ranked-choice voting proponents wanted the idea to gain momentum at an April 15 meeting of the county Finance and Government Operations Committee meeting. But Supervisors Betty Duong and Susan Ellenberg, who sit on the committee, opted to delay bringing the proposal to the full Board of Supervisors until sometime after Sept. 30.
Duong and Ellenberg had a simple reason: Santa Clara County has other stuff going on. The county’s staring down a potential budget calamity — and gutting of critical social safety net services — from the potential loss of hundreds of millions of federal dollars under President Donald Trump’s spending cuts. County supervisors are still unsure how much money they’ll have left to support ranked-choice voting’s estimated $4 million implementation.
“It’s not about the issue philosophically,” Duong said at the meeting. “It’s about the existential crisis of what this county will look like and how this county will operate.”
Implementing ranked-choice voting — a system where voters rank a candidate from first choice, second, third and so on — would cost about $4 million in the first year if applied only to countywide elected offices such as supervisor, sheriff, district attorney and assessor, according to estimates by county election officials. That includes nearly $3 million in one-time costs to educate residents about ranked-choice voting.
Sept. 30 marks the end of the current federal fiscal year, by which point county officials should know more about the extent of the federal funding losses they’re looking at.
“This topic doesn’t need to be a priority for this board right now,” Ellenberg said. “We may have to make extraordinary changes in how we fundamentally budget if we’re going to need to backfill the loss of federal dollars.”
Many details to work out
County officials said it doesn’t make sense to implement the new system, if approved, until 2028. Numerous decisions would still need to be made if supervisors approve the idea in general. They’ll have to decide how many county offices it will apply to, and whether to implement the system at the primary or maintain a runoff election. County lawyers will also have to draft policy that would come back for full board approval, unless county supervisors choose to put the question before voters again — nearly 30 years after receiving early voter support for the system in 1998.
County Executive James Williams voiced opposition to another ballot measure, calling the fiscal impact “not worth it.”
“We may have to make extraordinary changes in how we fundamentally budget if we’re going to need to backfill the loss of federal dollars.” Supervisor Susan Ellenberg
“It’s not something the administration would recommend, especially given the county’s broader fiscal situation and that voters previously vested the policy decision with the board of supervisors,” Williams said at the meeting.
The system has been in place in San Francisco since 2004, as well as Berkeley and Oakland since 2010. Other California cities using ranked-choice voting include Albany, Eureka, Palm Desert, Redondo Beach and San Leandro.
In a report attached to Tuesday’s meeting agenda, county leaders said those cities’ satisfaction with ranked-choice voting hinged on how much officials invested into educating residents about the system.
Contact Brandon Pho at brandon@sanjosespotlight.com or @brandonphooo on X.
This story originally appeared in San Jose Spotlight.