Arlington Makes Ranked Choice Voting Permanent For Board Primaries

ARLINGTON, VA — The Arlington County Board voted unanimously Tuesday to make ranked choice voting permanent for county-run primaries to nominate candidates for county board seats.

Board members only voted on whether to adopt ranked choice voting for future county board primary elections. Deciding whether to use ranked choice voting in general elections was not on the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting.

Ranked choice voting was the election method used in the Democratic Party’s primary election for two seats on the county board in June. The county board decided not to use the voting method in November’s general election for county board.

Tuesday’s decision means that ranked choice voting will be used in all county board primaries run by the county, beginning with the county board primary elections in June 2024, if the Democratic Party and other political parties decide to use county-run primaries to select their nominee for the one seat on the ballot.

Prior to the vote, Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey said that ranked choice voting allows the electorate to more deeply engage in the political process by examining the policy positions of all candidates on the ballot.

READ ALSO: Majority Oppose Ranked Choice Voting For Arlington Election: Survey

As for educating Arlington residents about the county board’s decision to use ranked choice voting in primary elections for county board, Dorsey said it is not only the Arlington County government’s job to explain how ranked choice voting works. He said it is also the responsibility of residents to explain the county board’s decision to fellow residents.

“I think we have to reset some expectations about what is the responsibility in civic discourse to inform people about elections,” Dorsey said. “There is a responsibility, in my opinion, for advocacy groups and candidates themselves. Nowhere is it said that it’s the government that tells everybody everything that they need to know about elections. A healthy democracy includes all of those folks, working together to keep people informed.”

Dorsey cited the work of the NAACP over the last several decades, which has helped residents understand how to participate in the political process, especially when government officials in parts of the country — during the Jim Crow era and even today — would try to suppress Black voter turnout by failing to provide timely and accurate information to them.

Prior to board members voting on the proposal Tuesday night, County Board member Tannia Talento said she supports allowing ranked choice voting in primaries because the electorate who votes in primaries tend to be the “most informed voters.”

As for expanding ranked choice voting to general elections in Arlington County, Talento said she thinks the electorate’s understanding is not good enough right now to make that change.

“My biggest concern at the general election is that many new Americans only vote in the general election,” said Talento, who noted that her immigrant parents only voted in general elections because they did not understand how candidates got on the general election ballot.

Public Views On Ranked Choice Voting

During the public comment period prior to the board's vote, Natalie Roy, a local Realtor who announced her 2024 candidacy for Arlington County Board earlier this month, said she would support the use of ranked choice voting when it is done properly.

"Unfortunately, it has been rolled out ineffectively in our county in two ways," Roy said.

First, the county under-invested in public education and ranked choice voting training, she said. Second, by switching back-and-forth between ranked choice voting in the June 2023 primary and plurality voting in November's general election, the county board "has made RCV appear to be a scheme to pre-determine an outcome of an election," she said.

"This abuse has made it very difficult for voters to take RCV seriously," Roy told the board members. "If you're going to do RCV, you must be transparent, invest enough time and resources for adequate countywide training, and you must commit all the way — every election or none."

Roy said that nothing has changed with the issues and concerns that emerged with the ranked choice voting from the June Democratic primary election. "The county board should defer on RCV until it has fixed the issues that it had with the last rollout," she said.

James DeVita, an Arlington lawyer who is also running for the county board in 2024, said he opposes ranked choice voting because it is trying to solve a problem that does not exist.

"Who are the people who are not being represented? I've never heard anybody name a specific person or party who is lacking representation," he said.

Ranked choice also is too complicated, he said, explaining that he does not believe there needs to be education outreach for people to learn how voting works. "Voting should be something that is simple, something that everybody should understand," he said.

Ranked choice voting also penalizes a candidate who takes a strong stand on a controversial issue because that candidate is unlikely to get a lot of second and third place votes, according to DeVita.

"There are times when to make progress, you need people who are going to stick their necks out and advocate for something controversial, like the abolitionists did before the Civil War or people who were opposed to segregation in the 1950s and 1960s," he said. "How many second-place votes do you think people like that would have gotten?"

Liz White, executive director of UpVote Virginia, a nonprofit organization that advocates for ranked choice voting, thanked the Arlington County Board for continuing to "trail blaze on ranked choice voting in Virginia."

The Arlington County Board's adoption of ranked choice voting in primaries for county board "will dispel the false narrative that's been spreading around the country for the past few months that Arlington tried ranked choice voting, and it didn't go well."

"I'm not exaggerating when I say that the eyes of every ranked choice enthusiast across the country has been on Arlington," White said. "Tonight's vote will hopefully reflect the reality of that experiment that Arlington County liked ranked choice voting so much that you are voting to make it a permanent fixture in county board primaries going forward."

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• Use Of Ranked Choice Voting Rejected By Arlington For General Election