Cara Brown McCormick
IRVINE, Calif.—In 2024, Larry Agran won a seven-candidate mayoral race in Irvine with less than 39% of the vote. That same year, the winners of five-candidate contests in City Council Districts 1 and 2 each captured less than a third of the vote.
Under Irvine's current "choose-one" plurality voting system, that is enough to win.
A measure headed to Irvine voters this November would change how those winners are decided. Measure D would adopt ranked choice voting (RCV) for mayoral and city council elections, replacing the plurality system that has produced winners without majority support.
Under RCV, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated, and those ballots are redistributed to each voter's next choice. The process repeats until one candidate has a majority and is declared the winner.
Irvine is not the only Orange County city considering ranked choice voting.
An OC Superior Court judge has ordered Huntington Beach to implement RCV as soon as this November's general election, a remedy meant to address complaints that the city's at-large elections disenfranchise minority voters. Huntington Beach is challenging that ruling in court rather than following the route many cities and school districts have taken in recent years, switching to district elections to head off similar lawsuits.
OC Registrar of Voters Bob Page has said he cannot offer a cost estimate for what a ranked-choice election would run, because his office has never administered one. In a letter filed in the Huntington Beach case, Page said the county does not currently have a state-certified voting system capable of conducting a ranked-choice contest.
How the Measure Reached the Ballot
On April 28, the Irvine City Council voted 4-3 to direct the City Attorney to present a draft ordinance and cost analysis by May 15. The push began when council members Betty Martinez-Franco, Kathleen Treseder and Melinda Liu sent the city manager a letter requesting the discussion, explaining that RCV eliminates "spoiler effects" and ensures the broadest possible community support.
"Those of us who are close to the elections know who the spoilers are and who's doing it, but the public at large wouldn't necessarily know," Treseder said.
Martinez-Franco framed the effort as "giving Irvine voters more choice." She added, "I like the fact that we can rank all of our candidates and we have that choice, but for those who are purists and want one candidate and one vote, they can still do that. It's a choice for everybody."
On July 14, the council voted 4-3 to place Measure D on the November 3 general election ballot. Martinez-Franco, Treseder, and Liu secured the necessary fourth vote from Councilmember William Go. Mayor Agran and council members James Mai and Mike Carroll voted no, the same opponents as in April.
Treseder introduced the measure, arguing it would help stop special interests from using "spoiler" candidates to split the vote. Liu framed her support as a matter of deferring to voters.
"This is something that will fundamentally change the way Irvine residents choose their representatives, and the decision to adopt it belongs to the voters," she said, adding, "My personal opinion doesn't matter at that point, because it is up to the voters."
If passed, Measure D directs the city to transition to RCV for elections after January 1, 2028, provided the shift is technically and financially feasible. Current OC voting machines don't support RCV, but the city attorney said the expectation is that they will by November 2028.
How Opponents of RCV Use Cost to Win Points
Cost has emerged as the central point of debate. Some news coverage has reported that the switch could substantially increase election expenses, with one report suggesting it could roughly quadruple them.
Measure D ties any transition to a cost cap of 0.23% of the city budget, which, city staffers estimated, would translate in 2028 to about $750,000. If implementation exceeds that cap, the council will scrap RCV for the 2028 election. For now, the city has allocated $15,000 to put the measure before voters.
But the ultimate price tag remains uncertain, and opponents are leaning in on that uncertainty.
“Moving to a new system — can we do that technically? And at what cost?” Mayor Agran asked.
“And this is all speculation, but I’m almost certain you can’t do it for $700,000. We can’t even hold a simple special election in Irvine for $700,000. But to change all the technology and the ballot and everything associated with it — especially when we’re first in — I’ve been told would cost millions.”
"If it's $1.5 million, if it's $2 million, $3 million, we don't know. We're just guesstimating how much it's going to cost," Mai said. Irvine is also grappling separately with a projected budget shortfall in the coming years, a concern raised by residents who argued that the added expense and voter-education burden are not worth it.
The cost concerns dominating Irvine's debate echo a familiar pattern in ranked choice voting fights across the country, where opponents' inflated estimates have often preceded far smaller actual bills.
Maine offers the clearest history: When citizens voted to adopt RCV, then-Secretary of State Matt Dunlap (a staunch opponent of RCV) projected the switch could cost up to $1.5 million. The reality came in well below that. According to the Maine secretary of state's office, the added cost for the 2018 cycle, startup costs plus costs for the primary and general elections combined, totaled $441,804, with 90% of that cost stemming from the cost of printing an extra page of ballots.
Irvine City Clerk Carl Petersen said the city’s last general election cost about $340,000.
Nonpartisan Coalition Backing RCV
Supporters of a switch to RCV argue that the current system leaves too many voters unrepresented.
The measure has drawn support from across the political spectrum. Both the Democrats of Greater Irvine and the California Libertarian Party have endorsed it. Tiffany Im, a Libertarian resident of the Woodbury neighborhood, says RCV lets voters "look beyond party labels." Dr. Kev Abazajian, a UCI physics professor and chair of Democrats of Greater Irvine, frames the measure as a matter of majority rule rather than partisanship.
Branda Lin, director of Voter Choice Irvine, says RCV means voters can "vote their conscience" without fear of casting a wasted vote. Lin points to Irvine's recent elections, where spoiler candidates and vote splitting have routinely produced winners with only about a third of the vote.
The reform is not new to California or the country. Arash Sayadi, Orange County Coordinator at CalRCV, says roughly 17 million Americans already live in places that use RCV, including about 50 cities, counties, and states, as well as statewide elections in Maine and Alaska.
Seven California cities use it, beginning with San Francisco in 2004, followed by Redondo Beach, Berkeley, Oakland, Albany, San Leandro and Eureka.
If Measure D passes, Irvine would become the first Orange County city to adopt RCV. Redondo Beach was the first city in Southern California to do so, in 2025.
Perhaps the most notable endorsement for RCV in Irvine is from the Orange County Register's editorial board, whose favorable take stands out given the paper's conservative-leaning reputation.
The board invoked the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis's description of states as "laboratories of democracy" and said it was "intrigued" by the council's decision.
It also noted that San Francisco's "moderate, reform-minded" Mayor Daniel Lurie won under RCV and wrote of its openness to rule changes that improve choice and representation rather than engineer partisan outcomes, with a caveat that "it's best to limit expectations."
RCV's main goal, the board wrote, is to better reflect voters' will. It said it doubts that RCV is a "panacea" for the nation's political divisions, but it likes that cities are experimenting.
Not everyone is convinced. Mayor Agran has publicly cautioned against overpromising what RCV can deliver, saying he sees attractive features in the system but does not want people to "delude" themselves about what it actually delivers.
A quick author's note: Rey López-Calderón, a strategic advisor for More Equitable Democracy, and I have been longtime figures in ranked choice voting advocacy and are graduates of University High School in Irvine.
When we were students there, Agran was serving his first term as mayor of Irvine, which ran from 1982 to 1984. Agran, now 81, holds that same office again today, roughly 45 years later.