Inside the plot to remake Huntington Beachs voting system

Kevin Shenkman has struck again.The liberal attorney convinced a local judge in Orange County to force the city of Huntington Beach to change its voting system — in the middle of an election cycle — to a ranked-choice system, rather than a traditional head-to-head ballot.The apparent goal: to undermine one of the last bastions of conservatism in Southern California.In ranked-choice voting, voters don’t choose between one candidate and another.Rather, voters rank candidates in order of preference. The vote is counted in several rounds: first choice, second choice, and so on.

The candidate with the fewest votes in each round is dropped, until only one candidate remains.In theory, ranked-choice voting ensures voters still have an impact if their preferred candidate loses in early rounds.In practice, ranked-choice voting allows fringe candidates to win.Socialist anti-Israel radical Zohran Mamdani failed to win a majority on the first ballot in last year’s Democratic primary in New York City, but won in subsequent rounds.Republicans particularly dislike ranked-choice voting, which has allowed Democrats to win in conservative states like Alaska. Democrats like it — which is why Shenkman is glad that conservative Huntington Beach will be forced to use it.But this is not Shenkman’s first rodeo.For more than a decade, Shenkman has specialized in suing California cities — liberal and conservative — to force them to change their electoral systems.Many cities had long chosen their councils through an at-large system, where each seat is voted on by the electorate as a whole.Yet after the California Voting Rights Act of (CVRA) was passed in 2001, activists could sue cities to force them to move to a district-based system if they could show that the at-large system made it harder for minorities (usually Latinos) to win.Crucially, the CVRA allowed plaintiffs to recover attorneys’ fees from cities if they won in court.

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