Ranked-choice voting was sold to San Franciscans as a way to ensure majority support for elected officials and reduce negative campaigning. In practice, it's become a strategic chess match — and right now, the Sunset District is the board.

District 4 Supervisor Alan Wong, who's aligned himself with Mayor Daniel Lurie's agenda, could find himself on the wrong end of an RCV alliance. The playbook is simple: challengers team up, encourage their supporters to rank each other second, and collectively pool enough ranked votes to overtake an incumbent who might win a traditional head-to-head race. It's not cheating — it's the system working exactly as designed. Whether that's a feature or a bug depends on where you sit.

Here's the thing about RCV that nobody in City Hall wants to say out loud: it doesn't actually guarantee the most popular candidate wins. It guarantees the least objectionable candidate wins. Those are very different things. A supervisor who takes bold positions — say, backing the mayor's efforts to trim bureaucratic fat or hold city departments accountable — paints a bigger target on their back than someone whose platform is a warm bowl of vague promises.

For Lurie, losing an ally on the Board of Supervisors would be a real blow. The mayor's agenda already faces an uphill battle with a board that treats fiscal discipline like a foreign concept. Every seat matters, and the Sunset — one of the more moderate districts in the city — should theoretically be friendly territory.

The deeper question here isn't really about Alan Wong. It's about whether San Francisco's electoral system rewards leaders who actually do things or punishes them for making enemies along the way. RCV incentivizes coalition-building, sure — but it also incentivizes blandness. And the last thing this city needs is more politicians whose biggest accomplishment is not offending anyone.

Sunset voters should pay close attention. The machinery is already in motion, and it's your district that's the test case for whether strategic alliances can override the will of a plurality. Democracy is messy. Ranked-choice democracy is messier.