Crowded Mayoral Race Exposes Why Los Angeles Needs Ranked Choice Voting

The city of Los Angeles will hold a primary election on June 2 in which fourteen people are running for mayor, including a sitting councilmember, a sitting mayor, and a former reality television personality. 

A recent poll found that 51% of voters are still undecided. The frontrunner, Mayor Karen Bass, has the support of 20% of those who have made up their minds.

This is the system working as designed. It is also, by almost any measure, a system straining under its own weight.

That tension is precisely what the Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission has spent the better part of a year trying to address.

In February, the 13-member citizens panel voted 10-1 to recommend that the city adopt ranked choice voting for all municipal elections beginning in 2032. It's a reform that would eliminate the current two-stage primary-and-runoff structure in favor of a single election in which voters rank candidates in order of preference. 

The commission's full package of recommendations goes to the City Council by April 2nd. The council has until the end of July to decide what, if anything, goes before voters in November.

What happens next will say a great deal about whether Los Angeles elected officials are serious about democratic reform or content with just talking about it.

The Mechanics, and Why They Matter

Ranked choice voting is not a new idea, nor is it an untested one. It is already used statewide in Maine and Alaska and in elections in New York City and 35 other cities.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has used a version of it for decades to select the Best Picture winner at the Oscars, held in LA. Academy members rank nominees in order of preference. If no film reaches 50% on the first count, the lowest vote-getter is eliminated, and those ballots transfer to each voter's next choice.

The process repeats until a winner emerges with majority support.

The Academy adopted the system for a straightforward reason: in a competitive field, a simple plurality vote rewards intensity of support, not breadth of it. Without RCV, a film beloved by a small and passionate minority can beat a film that most academy members would have preferred.

The same logic applies – with considerably different stakes – to elections.

Former Santa Monica Mayor Michael Feinstein, currently a candidate for California Secretary of State, has been a proponent of ranked choice voting for more than two decades. Feinstein, the co-founder of California’s Green Party, is also a supporter of proportional representation.

"Ranked choice voting allows voters to express their preferences over more than one candidate, it gets rid of the spoiler issue, and gives voters a much greater voice. It also saves money because the city is required to conduct one election instead of a primary and runoff election."

The Spoiler Problem Has a Name, and It's on the Ballot

The 2026 mayoral race in LA illustrates the spoiler problem with unusual clarity. 

Bass, the incumbent, leads the field at 20% in recent polling. Councilmember Nithya Raman, who entered the race just hours before the filing deadline in a surprise move that upended the political landscape, sits at slightly more than 9%. 

Spencer Pratt, the former reality television figure, is at just over 10%.

In a multicandidate field with a frontrunner at 20%, voters face a choice that has less to do with their actual preferences than with their strategic calculations. Bass and Raman are likely to draw from overlapping constituencies. A voter who genuinely prefers Raman must weigh whether voting sincerely risks splitting the progressive vote and delivering the runoff to someone else entirely. This is not a hypothetical concern. It is the defining feature of plurality voting in crowded fields, and it has a long history of producing outcomes that satisfy almost no one.

Under ranked choice voting, that same voter ranks Raman first and Bass second. The strategic dilemma disappears. The vote reflects what the voter actually wants.

Raman co-authored the measure that Los Angeles voters approved in November 2024, establishing an Independent Redistricting Commission, which takes the drawing of council district lines out of the hands of the politicians who benefit from them. 

A Commission Built for This Moment

The Charter Reform Commission was not convened to tinker at the margins. It was created in direct response to the city's 2022 audio leak scandal, in which elected officials were recorded making racist remarks, and to a broader pattern of corruption cases that had eroded public trust in the Los Angeles city government. Mayor Bass, City Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, and former Council President Paul Krekorian appointed its 13 members; the commission has been meeting since last July.

Its recommendations extend beyond ranked choice voting. In a 9-2 vote, the commission called for expanding the City Council from 15 to 25 members, a change that would be the first of its kind since 1925, when the city had fewer than 600,000 residents. Los Angeles today is the nation's 2nd-largest city, with nearly 4 million people, and each of its 15 council members currently represents an average of 265,000 constituents. At 25 seats, that number would fall to roughly 159,000. Supporters argued that smaller districts would produce more equitable representation, particularly for Black residents and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities that have historically been underrepresented on the council.

It is worth noting that the last time Los Angeles undertook a major charter overhaul, in 1999, voters created the neighborhood council system, expanded mayoral authority, and, on that same ballot, rejected any expansion of the council. A quarter century later, the commission is making the case again.

One moment from the commission's February meeting captured the stakes of the conversation. When Commissioner Christina Sanchez raised concerns that non-English-speaking voters and those in underserved communities might struggle to navigate a new ranked-choice voting system, the audience responded immediately. "Are you calling us stupid?" two attendees said. The commission moved to recommend a formal ordinance requiring language accessibility provisions and voter education as part of any implementation.

Marcela Miranda-Prieto is the Executive Director of CalRCV and has been leading the charge to make it a reality in LA. 

“Everywhere ranked choice voting is used, voters say they like and understand it,” she said. “RCV empowers voters with more choices and eliminates costly runoffs.”

The Larger Question

Sean McMorris, program manager for transparency, ethics, and accountability at California Common Cause, has written that pairing ranked-choice voting with California's nonpartisan election system would create political dynamics with no real precedent in cities that hold partisan primaries. The incentive structure for candidates would shift: attacking a rival too aggressively risks alienating that candidate's supporters, whose second-choice votes you might need. Progressives in New York City demonstrated this in practice, forming explicit alliances to maximize ranked-ballot support. Whether that kind of coalition politics would take hold in Los Angeles is an open question, but the structural incentives would point in that direction.

McMorris is clear-eyed about the political economy of reform. "Those who've won office through the current system are often the least eager to change it," he has noted. The City Council, which must decide by July whether to send these changes to voters, is composed entirely of people elected under the current rules.

That is the challenge Los Angeles faces, and it is not a small one. The Charter Reform Commission has done its work. The question now belongs to the city council.