Charlottesville Learns About Arlington's Use Of Ranked Choice Voting

CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA — The Charlottesville City Council was briefed on the use of ranked choice voting in upcoming elections on Monday, with election officials telling city council members about Arlington's experience with the voting method in the June Democratic primary.

Top election officials also answered questions from city council members about why Arlington County chose not to use ranked choice voting in the November general election.

Jim Nix, secretary of the Charlottesville Electoral Board, said the Arlington County Board rejected the use of ranked choice voting in the general election largely because candidates in the Democratic primary did not understand the tabulation process in the two-seat race.

Contrary to Nix’s statement to the Charlottesville City Council, no candidate in the Democratic primary has publicly said they did not understand the vote tabulation process in the two-seat race.

At their July 15 meeting, Arlington County Board members attributed their decision to reject the use of ranked choice voting in the general election to confusion among voters and among themselves about how it works.

Arlington County Board member Libby Garvey, for example, said that after seeing the use of ranked choice voting in the primary, she did not fully understand how the tabulation method worked in the two-seat primary election for county board. “I’m probably not the only one who doesn’t understand all of it,” she said.

Leading up to Arlington's use of ranked choice voting, advocates of the voting method noted that officials in jurisdictions across Virginia, including in Charlottesville, would be watching Arlington's use of ranked choice voting to see how it goes.

READ ALSO: Ranked Choice Voting In Arlington Scuttled By Vote Counting Confusion

After the primary, election officials in Arlington said voters generally found the voting process easy to understand. But many voters said they had trouble understanding the tabulation process. Some suggested the ranked choice voting system might make sense only when a single county board seat is open.

At Monday's Charlottesville City Council meeting, Nix also stated that the primary concern with ranked choice voting in Arlington was the use of fractional reallocation of surplus votes received by the first candidate to pass the 33.33 percent threshold.

While the fractional reallocation of Democratic primary winner Maureen Coffey’s votes was confusing to many voters, it was not the only part of the ranked choice voting system that baffled voters and county officials. Some voters who made Susan Cunningham, the other winner in the Democratic primary, their first-choice vote expressed concerns because they did not have their second-place votes counted.

Arlington County Board members also said they believe some voters in Arlington needed more time to understand all facets of ranked choice voting before allowing it to be used in a future election.

In 2020, the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation — patroned by Del. Patrick Hope of Arlington — that allowed Arlington to run elections using ranked choice voting. A similar measure patroned by Del. Sally Hudson, who represents Charlottesville in the House of Delegates, allowed the method to be used in other localities in Virginia. The bills took effect in 2021.

The first available opportunity for Charlottesville to try ranked choice voting, if the city council votes to adopt it, would be the June 2025 primary for city council.

Asked when she would prefer the city council to make a decision on ranked choice voting for the 2025 primary, Taylor Yowell, Charlottesville’s general registrar and director of elections, said it would be her preference for the city council to decide on ranked choice voting as soon as possible in order for her office to get the funding to run a ranked choice vote election and educate voters on the new voting method.

In his presentation to the city council, Nix said that public satisfaction with ranked choice voting in Arlington was “high” based on the results of some online surveys that were conducted.

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

But in the weeks following the June 20 primary in Arlington, some objections were raised to the tabulation method, Nix told the city council.

At the city council meeting, Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook, a Democrat, argued that a “voter doesn’t need to know exactly how the computer is going to be doing what it’s doing” in the distribution of surplus voters in a ranked choice voting election that uses a fractional reallocation method.

“The only people who are going to need to know are the conspiracy theorists who are convinced that there is something shady going on, or the computer science people who recognize that every program has a bug,” Snook said.

Nix, a fellow Democrat, countered that candidates need to know enough about the tabulation process to be confident that the system works.

As part of his presentation, Nix also explained that Arlington’s voting machines allowed only three candidates to be ranked in the June 20 primary, while Charlottesville’s Hart InterCivic's Verity voting machines allow up to six candidates to be ranked.

“Ours is a somewhat superior system,” he said.