Huntington Beach ordered by judge to adopt ranked choice voting - a first in the county

Huntington Beach, California, is on its way to becoming the first Orange County city to use ranked choice voting following a court ruling this week.

In a tentative ruling, Orange County Superior Court Judge Craig Griffin ordered the city to implement the new voting method for the November general election. If that's not enough time for the Orange County Registrar of Voters Office to integrate a ranked choice election, Griffin said adoption can be pushed back to the 2028 election.

Huntington Beach has two weeks to respond to the June 24 ruling.

It follows a long-running legal battle over Huntington Beach's at-large system, in which voters cast ballots picking a candidate for all open council seats. The Latino voter rights nonprofit Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and Victor Valladares, a Democratic activist and Huntington Beach resident, sued the city in 2024, arguing that its at-large elections have diluted the voting power of Latino residents, who make up 20% of the population in a city of about 200,000.

In a ranked choice election, voters rank all the candidates in order of preference instead of having to lock in on one. The candidates with the fewest votes are then eliminated, round by round, until the candidate who receives the majority of the votes is declared the winner.

The plaintiffs had been pushing for the city to adopt a by-district system in which the city is carved into geographic districts, with voters choosing a representative from their own area, creating a smaller voter pool and the opportunity for a minority group to have more impact. It is a change in voting process that several cities, school districts and other local government bodies have adopted in recent years in response to similar challenges to at-large voting not being equitable under voting rights law.

But Griffin said ranked-choice is a "less drastic remedy" that still allows Huntington Beach to maintain the at-large voting system called for in its charter.

"The court finds that a non-district-based remedy such as ranked choice voting, cumulative voting, or limited voting would provide Latino voters with the potential, on their own or with the help of crossover voters, to elect their preferred candidate," Griffin wrote. "Mandating a district-based election system would mean that each citizen of the city would no longer be able to cast a ballot for each seat and be limited to voting for candidates in their own district."

Griffin also ordered the city to consolidate the City Council's staggered terms so that all seven seats are on the ballot every four years. Under the ruling, Councilmembers Chad Williams, Butch Twining and Don Kennedy, who were elected in 2024, would serve two-year terms before facing reelection in November. The other four seats were already going to be on the November ballot.

The city did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kevin Shenkman, the attorney for Valladares and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, applauded the ruling. Although the plaintiffs had expressed a "slight preference" for by-district elections, he said ranked choice voting and unstaggering elections may end up being a more effective remedy in Huntington Beach.

Ranked choice voting "will give Latino voters a choice in local government they've been denied for decades," Shenkman said. "It'll give Huntington Beach residents the ability to inject a little bit of sanity into a City Council that has, at least in recent years, been quite insane."

Shenkman and the city's outside counsel, Norman Dupont, presented their arguments before Griffin in early February, but the judge delayed his decision when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, which drastically limited the use of race in drawing up congressional districts. Griffin ruled in the end that the high court's decision did not affect the way local elections are conducted in Huntington Beach.

Thirteen states use ranked-choice voting for municipal races, but efforts to implement the method in California have faced setbacks. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed legislation that would have allowed general law cities to conduct ranked choice voting. No Orange County city has adopted the system, though Irvine had recently considered putting the issue before voters. There are charter cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, that use the method in city elections.

It's unclear how much the implementation of ranked choice voting might cost, and who would be shouldering the cost. Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page said he can't provide a cost estimate without a "viable voting system solution," as the method has not previously been used in the county.

"The state-certified voting system used by the registrar of voters does not have a viable way to conduct a ranked choice voting election for the city," Page said in a statement. "The voting system vendor has plans to add ranked choice voting functionality to its software, which will then be reviewed and tested by the secretary of state before it is certified."

Last year, a state appeals court struck down the city's voter ID measure on the grounds that it violated state election law - a ruling upheld by the state Supreme Court. The city appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court in February. The appeal is pending.

(Staff writer Victoria Le contributed to this report.)

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