A “vote here” sign outside of a voting precinct in Arlington County, Nov. 5, 2024. (Nathaniel Cline/Virginia Mercury)
While many Virginians focused on this year’s congressional and presidential elections, Arlington County became the first locality in Virginia to use ranked-choice voting for city and county governing bodies in the general election Tuesday.
But three years after a law went into effect giving localities the option to adopt ranked-choice voting, only Arlington County and the city of Charlottesville have adopted the method common in college campus elections by students, and primary elections and conventions by Republicans in the commonwealth.
The chief concern has been around the lack of education.
“The biggest obstacles that we face in more localities adopting ranked-choice voting is that it’s always new, that it’s a change and I think especially changing the way we vote … in that space is hard,” said Liz White, executive director for UpVote Virginia, which has advocated for ranked-choice voting.
Arlington County became the first locality to adopt ranked-choice voting for its Democratic primary in June 2023 and again in June 2024. The process allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference, with elections officials reallocating those votes through several rounds of counting ballots.
On Tuesday, it was used for an open seat on the Board of Supervisors, which favored veteran JD Spain Sr., a Democrat who won with 58% of the first-choice votes.
Voters’ initial reactions were mixed. Some said they wished they had researched more about the candidates, but one admitted that they only ranked one of the four candidates out of preference. Other voters said they were also pleased to receive guidance about the process from volunteers at their precinct.
“I liked it actually because it’s tough when it’s a binary choice, like one or the other,” said Parker Wood, an Arlington resident. “I think it’s pretty good. It gives a more accurate distribution of data in terms of (what) people think.”
An exit survey conducted after the June primary by FairVote, a nonpartisan organization focused on voting reforms, found that 88% of Arlington voters said ranked- choice voting was “easy” and 67% said “they’d like to use it for future elections.”
Under former Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam, Virginia passed legislation in 2020 allowing localities to use the election method for city and county governing body elections. But lawmakers will have to consider renewing the legislation before it sunsets on July 1, 2031.
According to the state law, votes will be counted in each step to determine who wins or who has the least number of votes.
Advocates say the goal is to reflect the actual majority of the vote. However, some argue that may not be true under single transferable voting, which could allow candidates with minimal support to be elected to office.
Winter said ranked-choice voting could have been an idea instead of single choice voting in two Democratic primaries this past spring, where more than a dozen candidates vied for seats in the 7th and 10th Congressional Districts held by Abigail Spanberger and Jennifer Wexon, respectively.
Eugene Vindman, an Army veteran, won the 7th District primary with 49% out of seven candidates. However, in the 10th District primary, state Sen. Suhas Subramanyam won with 30.4% of the vote out of 12 candidates.
“I think having more cases in which ranked-choice voting could make a difference is going to help propel a lot of these local conversations forward,” Winter said, adding that having a ranked choice voting could have helped determine who the majority of voters believe should represent them.
Charlottesville’s about to become the second Virginia city to adopt ranked choice voting
In September, the Charlottesville City Council voted to adopt the method starting next year with the City Council primary in June.
Sally Hudson, former state delegate and author of the ranked-choice legislation, said at the Sept. 3 meeting that the creation of the state law involved top election law experts and organizations in drafting the legislation.
“A lot of people have done a lot of careful work over the last four years to get us where we are today,” Hudson told the council. “To use the popular parlance of our time: this ordinance did not just fall out of a coconut tree. We exist in the context of all that came before us, and in Charlottesville, that context goes back centuries.”
At that meeting, council members agreed to appropriate $26,460 for an educational and outreach program and to purchase equipment for ranked-choice voting tabulation.
In a second vote to adopt the election method, Council Member Lloyd Snook voted in opposition, citing concerns that a voter’s second selection could be devalued.
Instead, Snook recommended a sequential instant runoff system, claiming it could be a better alternative. Under the single transferable voting method, he disagreed that candidates who won would reflect the true majority of the vote.
“Although I completely agree with the notion of ranked choice voting, and would be really quite pleased to do it under a sequential, instant runoff voting system, I think most folks that I’ve talked to don’t understand how single transferable voting will actually work in terms of what that allocation looks like,” Snook said at the Sept. 3 meeting.
In response, Winter said that’s not the case because “voting for multiple candidates is a means to an end to achieve proportional representation,” White added.
“I think without understanding the why of proportional representation, it just feels like we took away one of your votes,” White said. “I understand that’s an adjustment, but the idea is to ensure that every voter is represented.”
Lawmakers have sought to expand the law to presidential primaries, but it failed in 2023.
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