As I write this on Wednesday morning, Loren Taylor has a slight but impressive lead over Barbara Lee. The conventional wisdom, endlessly repeated by the media, is that early returns favor the more moderate candidate (Taylor) while later returns incline toward the progressive (Lee). So we should expect the gap to narrow in the next few days. At the same time, turnout in the Hills—which went heavily to Taylor—appears to have been greater than in the flatlands, which is a good sign for him. So we’ll just have to wait and see, frustrating as that is.

All the local media blasted the news about a police shooting in Berkeley on Sunday like it was a story of international import. KTVU led the pack, starting their 5 p.m. news with it, followed by ABC News, Berkeleyside, KRON 4 News, the S.F. Chronicle, the Mercury News, CBS News, the East Bay Times—is there anyone I’ve forgotten to list?

It’s not the sexiest political issue, the corruption of political campaigns by unions. Sexy is when the FBI raids Sheng Thao’s home—that gets people’s attention. But the secret, under-the-table exchanges of cash in pay-for-play politics seldom makes the headlines, and for good reason: neither the unions nor the politicians want the public to know.

Is it the responsibility of Oakland’s government to make sure that every poor person in the city is able to enjoy the same benefits that middle-class or wealthy people enjoy? This is at the heart of the debate about who governs Oakland.

The election is going to come down to ranked choice, which means there’s a good chances Barbara Lee will win even though she’s likely to get fewer votes than Loren Taylor.

If this is the outcome, I hope it will generate a very noisy debate about ranked choice. In my opinion, ranked choice is a horrible, evil way of deciding elections. Nobody truly understands it: be honest and admit you don’t. The one thing we should know about ranked choice is that it means that the person who gets the most votes doesn’t necessarily win. And that should outrage us all.

Who dreamed up “ranked choice” anyway? It’s basically an invention of the left. As part of their obsession with “equity,” of making “every vote count,” they decided to overturn centuries of common law and practice. The details of ranked choice—how exactly it works—aren’t necessary to us to determine it’s an assault on the democratic (small “d”) tradition of our country. The U.S. Constitution is silent on the issue of determining how the winner of an election is determined; the document deals only with Presidential elections, which are won by obtaining a majority in the electoral college (a system itself which needs to be eliminated). We have to conclude that the Framers intended for each State to rule on election rules.

But obviously having 50 States makes that enormously complicated. Further muddying the waters is that, somehow, municipalities are further permitted to impose rules on elections; hence, ranked choice. It’s a terrible system in which the majority of voters are denied their rights to elect the candidate of their choice. The results are all too predictable: we end up with disasters, like Sheng Thao. It took nine separate rounds of recalculating the vote totals for the system to eventually select Thao as mayor. No individual made this decision, certainly not the voters themselves. Loren Taylor got the most votes on the first round (41,150 to Thao’s 39,909). That should have been that: in all of U.S. history up to that point, the “winner” was defined was the person who got the most votes. Instead, the computers were allowed to manipulate and remanipulate the vote totals, until the candidate the unions preferred—Thao—was declared the winner.

I’ll have plenty more to say about ranked choice in coming weeks. For now, just know that if Lee wins based on a phony ranked choice result, we voters should take to the streets and demand an end to this crooked system. We should flood our city council members with protests. I’m sure in my heart that Loren Taylor will get the most votes, but I fear in my mind that the true powers that run this city—the unions—will figure out a way to fix the results so that their candidate wins.