Charlottesville’s about to become the second Virginia city to adopt ranked choice voting

A woman walks by the Virginia Square precinct, where Arlington Democratic voters were using ranked-choice voting to select candidates for two seats on Primary Day 2023. (Sarah Vogelsong / Virginia Mercury)

Charlottesville’s about to become the second Virginia city to adopt ranked choice voting

Charlottesville’s city council approved a draft ordinance this week that will allow the use of ranked choice voting next year — when primary elections will be held for some council seats.

Though the measure will still need to formally pass at the next council meeting on Sept. 3 (as ordinances must pass twice), it’s slated for the consent agenda at that meeting. The city’s registrar, Taylor Yowell, also recommended its passage in a memo to council.

Ranked choice voting lets people select candidates on their ballot in the order of preference. Should a candidate win more than half of the first choice votes, they win the election, just as they would have in traditional voting. Should no one get more than half of the votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. If you voted for that person, then your vote goes to the next choice and counts are tallied again. The process is repeated until there’s a candidate with enough votes to win.

But unlike traditional voting, ranked choice voting means that voters have more input and potential to be satisfied should their top pick not win.

A push for ranked choice voting stems locally from Charlottesville as its former state delegate, Sally Hudson, carried legislation that former Gov. Ralph Northam signed into law four years ago. Now localities can adopt ranked choice voting for city council and board of supervisor elections.

Arlington first adopted the method last year, following a change in state law granting local governments permission to do so.

Richmond could have been the first Virginia locality to adopt the method in 2022, but councilors were still too uncertain about it at the time and ultimately voted it down . A key sticking point was that the law could not be applied to school boards or city-wide contests like Richmond’s mayor — which unlike most Virginia localities is a separately-elected official, rather than member of council.

“It’s just a more complicated conversation in Richmond,” Hudson said.

A subsequent effort to allow the law to be used for any local election was vetoed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin this year .

However, ranked choice voting during the 2021 GOP gubernatorial convention propelled him to the general election that year where he went on to become governor. But his ranked choice victory didn’t hinge on expansions to Hudson’s law because conventions are party-run contests.

But Hudson said that seeing ranked choice voting’s adoption and use locally is “a reminder that big changes are a series of small steps.”

Ranked choice voting is becoming more widely implemented nationwide. It’s currently allowed in 14 states and last year there were over 100 bills concerning it in 38 states, PBS reports .

Hudson noted that local, state and federal elections in Virginia in recent years have seen crowded candidate pools ahead of primaries and conventions.

“Democracy thrives when voters have options between lots of candidates — but right now, our ballots just are not built to let voters vote for who they really like when a lot of people run,” Hudson said. “Ranked choice voting solves that problem.”