Readers here know I am not a fan of Ranked Choice Voting in Irvine.  I’m still not, but I see the headline drew you in.  We see a lot of stats from studies about RCV that just doesn’t ring true.  OC ROV cannot handle an RCV election without significant investment.  A judge’s order than and Huntington Beach is being compelled to hosting a RCV election would should cut down on Irvine’s full cost.  But HB is a charter city and, we’re told, the city should win on appeal if it can make an arguement that adding districts in HB is cheaper than adding RCV.

Meanwhile, the biggest advocates for RCV are Irvine Council member Kathleen Treseder, who got like 22 percent of the vote in 2022, and Betty Martinez-Franco, who survived an election in 2025 because there was no RCV. not sure how you can get behind this.  And I think the tab will run into the millions.  Irvine’s city council will budget $710K for RCV and will abandon it if the costs exceed the allocated budget.  I think its going to cost us a lot more.  The city is already bleeding money from council staffing positions, new department headcounts, and the cost of running the Great Park amphitheater, among other expenses asscoiated with publis safety and infrastructure.

RCV is often sold like the sleek new upgrade democracy has supposedly been waiting for: smarter, fairer, more modern, and probably available in matte black if you ask nicely. But before anyone starts ordering celebratory cupcakes, it is worth pausing over one hilariously inconvenient number: the United States has roughly 10,499 voting jurisdictions, and only 62 of them use ranked-choice voting in some form.

That works out to about 0.59%. Not 5.9%. Not “a growing national consensus.” Not “the future is now.” About six-tenths of one percent. If ranked-choice voting were a restaurant, it would still be begging relatives to leave Yelp reviews.  I have been using a stat that 99.98% of all cities, counties, states, towns, villages and hamlets don’t use RCV.  I should have been counting voting jurisdictions.  Which makes the percentage “better” but not by much.  My mistake.

Supporters of ranked-choice voting often dismiss critics by waving them away as parroting these as Republican talking points. Convenient. Also lazy. When a reform is used in only 62 out of 10,499 voting jurisdictions, skepticism is not exactly fringe behavior. It is the default position of almost the entire country. And it’s actually non-partisan.

At that adoption rate, opponents do not need a party memo. They can simply point to the map, squint at the microscopic footprint, and ask why everyone else has not joined the revolution. Maybe the other 99.41% of jurisdictions are not all trapped in a smoky back room plotting against reform. Maybe they have budgets, voters, equipment contracts, legal timelines, staff shortages, and a healthy aversion to turning election night into a graduate seminar.

Then there is the cost. A county registrar of voters does not just sprinkle ranked-choice dust on existing ballots and call it a day. Implementing RCV for one community can require voting-system review, ballot redesign, software configuration or third-party tabulation tools, testing, certification work, staff training, poll-worker training, public education, outreach in multiple languages, updated procedures, post-election reporting changes, and possibly hardware or vendor upgrades.

Depending on OC’s existing system, vendor contracts, certification requirements, scale, and whether current hardware and software can actually handle ranked ballots, the price tag could plausibly run from hundreds of thousands of dollars into the millions. And that is just to make one community’s election process more complicated in a county office already expected to be fast, accurate, transparent, multilingual, accessible, litigation-proof, and somehow inexpensive.

RCV is advertised as an instant runoff, which is a wonderful phrase because it contains the word “instant” and therefore sounds efficient. But contested elections are not made magically simple because the counting process has more steps, more rounds, more transfers, and more explanations. Close races can still be close. Litigation can still happen. Public records requests can still pile up. Campaigns can still challenge procedures. Voters can still wonder why their second or third choice did or did not matter.  Using pizza toppings to explain RCV only works if you only order one topping pies.

RCV does not eliminate election drama. It may simply move the drama from “Who got the most votes?” to “Please enjoy this multi-round tabulation spreadsheet while everyone argues about exhausted ballots.” Very modern. Very tidy. Definitely not the sort of thing that makes public trust harder to maintain when the margin is razor thin.

Another sales pitch for RCV is that it supposedly makes campaigns more positive because candidates want to be everyone’s second choice. Lovely theory. In practice, politics has a stubborn habit of remaining politics. Under RCV, campaigns can still go negative; they just get more creative about it. A candidate can attack a rival as “too extreme” while begging that rival’s voters for a second-place ranking. Outside groups can still carpet-bomb mailboxes with hit pieces. Campaigns can whisper that one opponent is secretly unelectable, another is a spoiler, and a third is gaming the ranking system. The nastiness does not disappear; it just comes with footnotes and a sample ballot.  Note the NYC Mayoral race — the primary was Nasty as could e,

If reform advocates are looking for a project worthy of all that energy, maybe they should redirect some of it toward the Electoral College. Unlike RCV, which is still used by a tiny fraction of jurisdictions, presidential elections affect every voter in the country. Reforming how electoral votes translate into presidential power would at least aim at the main stage instead of arguing over whether one city council race needs a fifth-choice bubble.

Here is the central problem for ranked-choice voting evangelists: if the system is so obviously superior, why is its adoption still hovering around 0.59% of U.S. voting jurisdictions? After years of advocacy, white papers, pilot programs, nonprofit campaigns, glowing op-eds, and reform slogans, the country has largely responded with a polite “we’ll think about it.”

That does not prove RCV is evil, unconstitutional, or part of a sinister plot to make voters rank people they already dislike. But it does prove that caution is not extremism. Asking about cost, complexity, auditability, timelines, voter confusion, and contested-election delays is not partisan paranoia. It is basic election administration.

Ranked-choice voting may be beloved by reform advocates, consultants, and people who think every ballot should come with a tutorial. But the numbers are stubborn: 62 jurisdictions out of 10,499 is not a movement sweeping America. It is a niche experiment with a very active public-relations department.

So yes, debate RCV on the merits. Discuss majority winners, spoilers, runoffs, voter choice, and all the usual talking points. But do not pretend that every critic is reading from a Republican script when nearly the entire election-administration universe has declined to use the system. Sometimes skepticism is not a conspiracy. Sometimes it is a county registrar looking at the price tag, the software requirements, the training burden, the timeline, the possibility of a contested election, and saying: “Hard pass.”

I notice that Irvine’s Pro-RCV crew will be giving away free T-shirts, probably to make those out-of-town RCV supporters feel better.  You don’t need a free T-shirt,.  All you need here is common sense.