LoCO does not need to declare again to you that we all live in one of the most ludicrously beautiful places on this planet (or any other, probably). Some years back the Washington Post ranked every county in the U.S. in terms of its “natural amenities.” Humboldt County came in at number two behind Ventura County, which… c’mon. We were the winner. Still are. 

But while we do settle into long periods of #blessed euphoria, sometimes even we get bored. And the mind wanders. Sure, Humboldt is pretty, but which part of Humboldt is the prettiest? Now that Leo’s gone, we need something else to talk about. So we’re doing this. 

So we’re gonna run a very, very special edition of LoCO Pollz. To make it fair, we thought we’d divide the county into its supervisorial districts — which all have roughly the same populations — and run our Humboldt beauty contest along those lines. We will forgive you if you don’t know which of Humboldt’s picturesque locations fall into which district. Let us help you with the district rundowns below. 

Click map to enlarge

(If you’d like some further visual clarification on how the districts are broken up, click the map to the right.)

Now, we need to level with you a bit. We mentioned that this was a special edition of our obnoxiously popular LoCO Pollz feature. This one’s gonna be a li’l different. In truth, LoCO was just looking for a good way to test out its latest creation… RANKED CHOICE LoCO POLLZ. Ahhh! 

Let us explain. This November, if everything goes according to plan, Humboldt County will get its first taste of ranked-choice voting — a somewhat trendy electoral method — when the City of Eureka votes for two city council seats. The implementation of Measure C, which that city’s voters approved in 2020, has taken a bit longer than it was foreseen to take, but it looks to be all ready to go by the fall. 

It’s gonna be a bit confusing for some voters! Rather than just picking a favorite candidate, voters will be asked to rank the candidates for city council in their order of preference — favorite, second-favorite, third-favorite, etc. That’s the first confusing part.

The second potentially confusing thing is how those votes will then be tabulated, using an instant-runoff system. In brief: First they count everyone’s first-place votes. If a candidate receives more than half of those votes, then that candidate is the winner. If not, then the lowest-finishing candidate is eliminated. We then take the second-place votes of everyone who voted for that eliminated candidate and add those second-place votes to the respective candidates’ totals. And so on and so on, until we get a candidate that cracks more than 50 percent of the vote.

Need an example? Consider this hypothetical race between the letters A through F for the hearts and minds of Humboldt County.

Still confused? Maybe a little bit? Well, that’s one reason we’re ranked-choiceifying our polls. Let’s work out the kinks on dumb internet things before we have to do it for real. We’ll take questions in the comments if you have any.

For now, just rank the supervisorial districts below from prettiest to not-prettiest by dragging them into their proper order, then hitting submit. This time next week, we will have a consensus winner! Exciting! In the meantime, we’ll tabulate the votes every 15 minutes, so check back often to see how your district is faring.

VOTE NOW! Rank Humboldt’s Districts From Most to Least Pretty!