Despite high turnout among female voters, especially in Black communities, minority candidates are still underrepresented in US political office. One possible reason is that female and racial minority candidates are disadvantaged due to strategic voting in plurality/two-round runoff elections, as this system can incentivize voters to choose their second-best candidate — if they believe this candidate has a better chance of winning among the broader electorate — over their most preferred one in order to avoid an even less desirable election outcome. Ranked-choice voting (RCV) systems, by contrast, have the potential to lower the incentives for strategic voting because votes for low-performing candidates are not “wasted” but rather reallocated to better-performing candidates in a voter’s ranked list. Accordingly, we measure whether the introduction of RCV increases the chances that female and racial minority candidates win local elections. Specifically, we leverage the introduction of RCV for municipal elections in four Californian cities since 2004 to identify whether RCV has an effect on the electoral chances for minority candidates using difference in differences estimation. Preliminary results suggest that RCV has no effect on the electoral chances of female candidates, but it has a small positive effect on candidates from racial minorities. We further analyze the potential mechanisms for an effect such as changes in voter turnout and the size and characteristics of the pool of candidates following the introduction of RCV.