Voters in San Luis Obispo will elect two city council members on Nov. 3, but for the first time, they will only be allowed to vote for one candidate.
Beginning with the Nov. 3 election, the city will use a new system called Citywide Single Vote. Under the system, each voter can select one city council candidate, despite two open seats. The two candidates who receive the most votes citywide will be elected. Previously, voters could select up to two candidates.
The City Council voted to adopt the new system on Nov. 19, 2024. Since then, local officials have worked to inform voters about the rule change through public service announcements and press releases.
Incumbent Emily Francis is running for one of the two open city council seats, along with incumbent Michelle Shoresman and candidate Brett Cross. Francis said many voters she has spoken to already know about the change.
“I’m really sensing that there’s a high awareness of the new voting system,” Francis said.
The new voting system stems from a 2023 legal demand from the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project — a Latino voter-participation organization headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. The group alleged the city’s election system violated the California Voting Rights Act by diminishing the electoral influence of Latino voters and called for the city to switch to district-based elections.
The city disputed the allegations but later agreed to a settlement that allowed it to keep citywide elections while adopting the single-vote system.
Although the new system limits San Luis Obispo residents to selecting a single candidate, Francis said she remains engaged with voters.
“I’m out almost every day knocking on doors, and the advantage of that is that I get to have a little bit more freedom to have those long form conversations, so it’s been great to be able to kind of use that as a neutral starting point for talking about the upcoming elections, particularly now as ballots are getting closer to dropping,” Francis said.
Additionally, Francis believes the new system may empower smaller voting blocs by allowing them to concentrate their support behind a preferred candidate.
A voting bloc is a group of voters who share similar background, identity and political goals.
“The lawsuit’s basis was that it was supposed to give more power to our Latina voters specifically,” she said. “But it could have the potential to empower any smaller voting bloc to be able to get a candidate of their choosing into a seat when they might not otherwise have been able to do that. So whether or not it happens in this first round remains to be seen.”
Brett Cross, who served on the city’s planning commission in the 1990s, said one of his concerns with the single-vote system is that it keeps elections citywide rather than giving council members responsibility for individual districts.
“I think that district elections are the direction the community should be going in,” Cross said.
Cross said he believes dividing the city into separate geographic areas would give residents a more direct relationship with the council member representing them.
“When you have more knowledge about the district you live in, there’s more accountability,” Cross said.
While Cross criticized the new voting system, Cal Poly political science professor Michael Latner said the single-vote system can change how voting blocs translate their support into seats.
“If the largest groups all vote for the same person, that person gets a lot of votes, but they only win one seat,” Latner said.
Under the old system, voters were allowed to spread their support across more than one candidate, according to Latner.
“Imagine you have a city that’s split 60-40 between establishment, anti-establishment groups or whatever the case might be, when every voter has a number of votes equal to the number of seats being elected,” Latner said. “They can vote for their two favorite candidates and then win both seats.”
San Luis Obispo is not the only place in California affected by legal demands from the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project. Huntington Beach, Cypress and Galt are among the California cities that have received similar legal demand letters or faced lawsuits tied to the organization in the past five years.
In some cases, they have been met with pushback from city officials.
“This is nothing more than another fight from an outsider who seeks to fundamentally change Huntington Beach,” then-Huntington Beach Mayor Gracey Van Der Mark wrote in an official response in 2024.
Van Der Mark also pointed to her own 2022 election in defending the city’s at-large voting system.
“I am 100% Latina, and I won in a landslide in 2022 because I worked hard during my campaign,” she wrote.
In June 2026, Orange County Superior Court Judge Craig L. Griffin ruled against Huntington Beach, finding that the city’s at-large voting system violated the California Voting Rights Act.
While cities such as Huntington Beach opted to fight the allegations in court, San Luis Obispo chose a different path to resolve the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project’s legal demand, opting for a settlement that keeps citywide voting intact.
However, implementing the new voting system may affect candidates on the ground by requiring them to focus their campaigns more narrowly on certain groups of voters, according to Latner.
“There might not be a single candidate that gets above the electoral threshold, and so it requires candidates to run more constituent-specific campaigns,” Latner said.
The city plans to evaluate the results of both the 2026 and 2028 elections. The reviews will consider voter turnout and participation, as well as the performance of candidates preferred by minority voters.
After each election, the city and the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project will assess the system and discuss whether further changes are necessary.