Steven Hill, a political consultant with a long history of working on San Francisco election laws, joined District 7 Supervisor Sean Elsbernd on Tuesday in a spirited, in-depth, and occasionally tense debate over the merits of San Francisco's ranked-choice voting (RCV) system, moderated by USF Professor Corey Cook on the second floor of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association offices.

The debate opened with a point-by-point response from Hill to the many criticisms which have been leveled against the RCV system, particularly in the past year or so as RCV gained a lot of publicity due to its being used for the first time in a mayoral election in San Francisco. Hill stressed that “no election system is perfect,” and accused opponents of RCV of comparing its effectiveness to perfection.

Hill went on to detail why, in his view, December runoff elections were abandoned in favor of ranked choice. He pointed to a significant decline in voter turnout for December elections, as well as a substantive difference in the demographics of the voting population: as he put it, “an older, whiter, wealthier, more conservative electorate.” Hill quoted the San Francisco Ethics Commission's finding that independent expenditures — political spending by groups not officially aligned with any campaign — increased fourfold during the December runoff campaigns, and noted that this finding occurred before the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, which would likely make such expenditures even more prolific.

Going beyond the wonkier objections to December runoffs, Hill also attacked the old system for fostering the one thing nearly all San Franciscans seem to agree is a problem: negative campaigning. While the 2011 mayoral race got nasty toward the end, Hill reminded the audience of far more bitter and painful elections, referring to “race-baiting” in the contest between Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzalez, or “gay-bashing” in Willie Brown's second campaign, when he ran against Tom Ammiano. He compared such virulent attacks to the relatively congenial 2011 campaign, in which candidates sought to find common ground, and outright ranked-choice coalitions were formed.

Hill pointed to figures showing that, even though many ballots are exhausted during the process of tabulation, the current Supervisors tended to have won with more votes thanSsupervisors used to garner under the old system. Hill also noted the increased cost of a two-stage election — $3-5 million—and claimed that ranked-choice voting had increased diversity on the Board of Supervisors, doubling the number of minorities on the board and tripling the number of Asian-Americans. Hill argued that the Board was the most diverse governing body in the nation, and that this was due to RCV. He finally addressed questions about voter perceptions of the system, noting that 73% of voters used all three of their rankings, and that another 11% used two.

Elsbernd's argument boiled down to one central element: choice. He framed it as the question, “Do you want your elected officials to be elected by the majority of 'continuing ballots' or the majority of total ballots cast?” Elsbernd argued that RCV was undemocratic, and that voters were showing up to the polls having done their homework, ready to participate in the system, but their votes were essentially remaining uncounted. While Hill had pointed out, and would point out again later, that many of those same voters never participated in December runoffs, the key distinction for Elsbernd appeared to be the issue of choice. In a two-stage system, most voters choose not to participate in the “final round.” Under RCV, some voters — although the number is far lower — have had their ballots exhausted by the time of, and are therefore barred from, the “final round.”

Elsbernd did not call for a return to the old December runoff system, instead acknowledging the numerous problems with the idea and arguing for a June or September primary, basically taking the old two-stage election/runoff cycle and moving it to earlier in the year. His arguments rarely varied from the central theme of whether or not voters have control over how far along they get to participate in the vote tabulation. But even when the question was raised, both by Hill and by a couple of questioners from the floor, of a potential RCV system that would allow voters to rank every single candidate in the race, thereby insuring their ballots' inclusion at every stage, Elsbernd refused to accommodate the idea, instead pointing to the Department of Elections' recent comments that there was no currently legal method for designing such a ballot. Meanwhile, Hill said that, in the absence of ranked-choice, he would accept the compromise of a ranked-choice election that narrowed the candidates down to two, who would then go head-to-head in a full runoff, although he warned that the consequences of a runoff election would remain in place.