Ranked Choice Voting and Racial Minority Voting Rights in the Bay Area
May 15, 2018
In this short report, FairVote assesses the election rates of people of color in the California Bay Area before and after the adoption of ranked choice voting.
People of color hold 61% of RCV offices in the Bay Area, compared to 39% before RCV was implemented. [Update: As of July 2024, this number has risen to 65%.]
We also demonstrate that people of color win office more often since the adoption of ranked choice voting across three different ways of categorizing districts: plurality-minority (districts where one ethnic minority group is the largest in the district); white-plurality (districts where ethnic minority groups are collectively in the majority, but whites are the largest single group); and white-majority.
