The Mercury News36%
Opinion: Establishment partisans keep smearing ranked choice voting because they fear the majority 78%
By Paul Haughey95%
8/7/2026, 3:45:27 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Indoctrination, and Negativity Bias, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 38.9% saturation with 287 hits. Analysis detected 1,855 faulty-reasoning hits from 738 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 61.6% and a BS Rank of 78% (6,768 of 30,584 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 77.90% of the article peer group.
The Santa Clara Republican Party recently distributed debunked talking points against the San Jose City Council’s consideration of ranked choice voting (RCV) for special elections.
This is the result of a campaign to discredit RCV with misinformation by politicians threatened by it.
RCV is being resisted desperately by organizations and individuals who feel they have their fingers on the buttons of power.
The far-right Heritage Foundation has two election priorities for 2026 – voter ID and stopping ranked choice voting, also a Project 2025 goal.
Republican controlled legislatures in 18 states have now banned RCV, including states where voters had approved RCV for their cities.
In a 19th state, Missouri, voters approved the ban but only after the Legislature hid it in a ban on non-citizen voting and deceitfully said it would “prohibit the ranking of candidates by limiting voters to a single vote per candidate.”
By contrast, Maine and Alaska adopted RCV with a vote of the people.
Resistance to RCV also comes from incumbent Democrats and some of the PACs supporting them.
Here in California, Democratic governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom both vetoed bills to allow general law cities to adopt RCV.
Both major parties opposed ballot measures to adopt open primaries with RCV in Nevada and Colorado in 2024.
A divided Democratic Party rules committee has proposed a ban on RCV for presidential primaries, to be voted on by the DNC at its Aug. 15 meeting.
Why are some politicians so scared of RCV?
Because it ensures majority rule – an instant runoff is done using voter rankings until a candidate has a majority.
These politicians want to maintain the minority rule that got them elected.
They succeed by courting a minority with divisive rhetoric and winning with plurality voting (the most votes win, even if less than 50%).
RCV also removes the ability to threaten an incumbent with a primary challenger if the incumbent doesn’t purely toe the party line.
“Election integrity” think tanks finance “studies” of RCV that claim to find flaws in RCV.
Steve and I discuss dozens of such studies in our paper “Shaky Political Science,” which found that most of these anti-RCV studies used clearly biased and flawed methodology.
That’s either an amazing coincidence of errors or the studies were cynically designed to contrive flaws in RCV.
Misinformation campaigns by RCV opponents then get these flawed “studies” uncritically cited by the media during RCV proposition campaigns.
Legitimate studies using exit polls on actual RCV elections find that 80-95% of voters find RCV easy to understand.
However, instead of using exit polls on actual elections, some “studies” do a mock online election with almost no explanation of how RCV works.
When asked, a number of the participants, of course, say RCV is confusing.
In real elections, there is always an extensive public education campaign.
Another talking point is that RCV is unconstitutional because it violates “one person, one vote.
” But the courts have repeatedly held RCV to be constitutional, and the anti-RCV crowd knows this because they brought the suits.
With RCV, each person has only one vote, but it can be transferred to another choice in an instant runoff if a first choice is eliminated, just as in standard separate runoff elections.
They also allege that RCV is virtually un-auditable, despite it being commonly audited in the over 800 RCV elections that have been held in the U.S. over the years.
Cities should adopt RCV to ensure majority rule – and to eliminate costly, low-turnout primaries or runoffs.
California should keep its open primary, but, like Alaska, send four to five candidates to the general election, where the higher voter turnout can use RCV to ensure a winner with majority support.
We citizens will need to fight for RCV, because many politicians of both parties, and their special interest supporters, want to maintain the divisive politics they used to obtain power.
The best way to defend against their misinformation campaigns is to recognize what’s really going on here:
The political establishment on the left and right is committed to self-preservation above all else.
The majority’s will be damned!
Paul Haughey is the legal chair and on the board of directors of the California Ranked Choice Voting Institute, and he is the author of “Divided and Conquered — How to fix our divisive political system.
”
Speakers
2speakers8.1%attributed speech678writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageHeritage Foundation
23 attributed words38% of attributed speech84% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Loading…
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.