In 2004, San Francisco adopted ranked-choice voting to elect city officers, where voters rank their choices instead of voting for one. In an instant runoff process, ballots are counted for their highest-ranked eligible candidate. If no one wins a majority of cast votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and the process repeats. This way, no vote is "wasted" and many more votes help to decide the winner.

Even more powerfully, ranked ballots allow voters to "self-district" themselves in multi-winner elections. Voters have much more choice and freedom, almost all votes help elect a winner, and all of those votes count equally. This is done by deferring voters to their next choices when candidates have more than a seat's worth of votes. In practice, voters are assigned to 4- to 9-seat geographic districts, and then assign themselves to a specific winning representative during the counting process.