The New York Times has this story about the low turnout in the Los Angeles city election of March 5. One of the two mayoral candidates in the run-off, Wendy Greuel, says she favors moving Los Angeles elections for city office to November of presidential election years. She doesn’t say whether she favors ranked-choice voting; the only alternative would seem to be a run-off in December of presidential years, or January of the following year.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
The article doesn’t say anything about moving the election to November of presidential election years.
If the election were moved to even years, the primary could be held coincident with the Top 2 Open Primary, when county supervisors are elected, with any runoff in November.
The boundaries for LAUSD and LACCD are not coincident with the Los Angeles city limits, and it appears the portions of those districts that were outside the city limits had really low turnout. It appears that some of those races were administered by Los Angeles County, while the city elections were done by the city.
Although this particular article doesn’t say the proposal is for presidential election years, there are other sources and articles that do say that.
Los Angeles County has been electing its supervisors, sheriff, assessor, and district attorney at the even-year June primary (with a possible November runoff) for the past 70 years with nobody commenting about the low turnout.
I suspect the incremental cost of adding a few city races will be quite small, and should represent a net saving over the city conducting its own elections.