The election is less than one week away, but what’s sooner than that? Halloween. And what’s sooner than that? My cat’s birthday.
Her name is Sally Carrera, and we got her a month ago during a Halloween sale at the shelter. Yes, she was a discount cat. And yes, the shelter named her after the Porsche from the animated movie “Cars.”
In honor of this very special day, I made everyone I know help me pick the best photo of Sally through ranked-choice voting.
There were five photos to choose from, and endorsements were made. Mission Local’s donor engagement lead, Vicky Anibarro, ran attack ads on our office Slack against the photo of Sally reading Proust. Editor Lydia Chavez said she would vote for the photo of postpartum Sally because she “supports women.”
Then ballots were filled out. Everyone could rank as many — or as few — photos as they wanted. But they couldn’t rank multiple photos first. That would disqualify their ballot.
The same rules apply in San Francisco’s election, which will have 13 mayoral candidates.
After all the ballots were cast, everyone’s first choice vote was counted.
The photo with the least number of votes was eliminated. Proust-reading Sally was taken out of the running, a blow to scholarly cats everywhere.
Everyone who cast their first choice vote for the photo that was eliminated then had their second choice vote counted.
After their votes were redistributed, the next photo with the fewest votes was eliminated.
This process continued until there was a photo that received more than 50 percent of the votes. The photo of Sally tearing up my notepad — “Menace Sally” — was crowned the winner.
While perusing cat photos may be more enjoyable than ranking politicians — at least, in my very unbiased opinion — remember to vote on Nov. 5. Mission Local’s election dashboard is here to help you make an informed decision.
After you’ve cast your ballot, go adopt a cat to celebrate!
So cute!!! Don’t forget, though: if no candidate secures 50% of first choices and candidates begin to be eliminated and votes redistributed, then your ballot can become “exhausted” if everyone you ranked is eliminated. Exhausted ballots don’t count in the final tally. It’s like you never voted. It’s not unusual in SF for more than 10% of ballots to be set aside due to ballot exhaustion once a race enters an instant runoff (candidates eliminated / 2nd, 3rd, and lower-ranked choices considered).
Do you need to strategize to avoid exhaustion? Or is it just like, well, if you pick unpopular people, eventually your vote doesn’t go anywhere?
Good question, Amy. It really depends on the your preference. If you want to “ride or die” with just one candidate, that’s cool. But I would just want you to have notice that ballot exhaustion is a thing beforehand.
About 2/3s of SF’s RCV races are determined by first choices only, so when you rank multiple folks, you’re doing so in anticipation of a possible “instant runoff” where the race will be reduced to two people.
Mathematically, if you rank all or all but one of the candidates, your chance of ballot exhaustion would be zero. Practically, if you have a solid sense of who the frontrunners are, just put them (or all but one of them) in your preferred order, and it would be VERY unlikely that your ballot would become exhausted. For instance, in the current race for Mayor, if you’ve ranked three out of these four (Breed, Lurie, Peskin, and Farrell), then I’d be confident your ballot won’t be exhausted. If the one you leave off your ballot makes the top two, your vote would end up with one of the three preferred candidates against the omitted frontrunner in the final round.
A similar approach: 1) rank your fav, 2) imagine a runoff when your fav has been knocked out of the race… who would you pick? 3) imagine a runoff when your top two favs have been eliminated… who would you pick? 4) Repeat. If you reach a point when the remaining field is so unappealing that you wouldn’t even vote if they were the only candidates in the race, then you can stop making choices. Later, if the top two come from that unappealing pool (and your ballot ended up exhausted), at least your were conscious of it, rather than being left in the dark about certain RCV features (continuing and exhausted ballots).
Hey, that’s adorable, haha, very, clever!
Ok does Sally have an instagram??