Charlottesville City Council discussed a measure that would implement ranked choice voting for the June 25, 2025 Council primary at its Aug. 19 meeting. Charlottesville community members who came to speak at the meeting voiced their support for the measure, with many urging the Council to adopt the ordinance at its next scheduled meeting Sept. 3.
Ranked choice voting is a practice where voters rank their choice of candidates at the ballot box, instead of selecting only one candidate. If no candidate receives a majority — or above 50 percent of the vote — an instant runoff takes place that takes into account the non-first choice candidates of voters whose first choice candidate was eliminated by not receiving sufficient votes. The practice is, in part, intended to prevent voters from having to go to the polls more than once and vote in runoff elections, which typically experience low turnout.
Because the June 25 primary will be a multi-seat race, proportional ranked choice voting would be used instead of single-winner ranked choice voting, which is used for single-seat races. In an election using proportional ranked choice voting, candidates must receive enough votes to surpass the given threshold in the election, depending on how many seats are up for election. This contrasts single-winner ranked choice voting, where candidates must receive more than fifty percent of the vote to win the election.
Eden Ratliff, deputy city manager for administration, Taylor Yowell, general registrar and director of elections and attorney Rob Hubbard gave a presentation to Council members on what ranked choice voting is, how it would be implemented in Charlottesville and what an election using ranked choice voting would look like.
Hubbard said the adoption of this ordinance will only apply for the June 25 primary election in 2025. After the primary, City Council could decide to permanently implement ranked choice voting, according to Hubbard.
“If voters and [the] Council decided they wanted to use this method going forward, they would have to pass another ordinance that would then extend ranked choice voting to the November election,” Hubbard said.
The Virginia General Assembly passed legislation in 2020 to give localities the choice to implement ranked choice voting for local governing bodies, such as city councils and boards of supervisors. The statute went into effect July 1, 2021 and will expire July 1, 2031 unless it is renewed by the General Assembly.
Should City Council vote in favor of ranked choice voting, Charlottesville would become the second largest locality in Virginia to approve the measure for local elections, after Arlington. Arlington first sanctioned ranked choice voting to be piloted in last summer’s County Board Democratic primary. Arlington’s County Board then voted in December to implement the measure permanently for all primary elections.
Ranked choice voting has also gained traction outside of Virginia, with Alaska and Maine having implemented the practice for statewide and federal elections, which has yielded some unexpected results. Mary Peltola, a Democrat, won Alaska’s Republican-leaning at-large congressional district in 2022, and Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine’s 2nd) has won reelection three cycles in a row in a district former President Donald Trump won in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
While implementing ranked choice voting is a relatively new prospect for Virginia localities, other smaller scale elections have used rank choice voting — including student elections at the University. Sally Hudson, founder and board chair of Ranked Choice Virginia, a non-profit with the mission of bringing ranked choice voting to the Commonwealth, said University students can play a critical role in expanding ranked choice voting to areas outside of Charlottesville — citing Albemarle county, which surrounds the independent city.
“A lot of students are Albemarle County residents rather than [residents of] Charlottesville city,” Hudson said. “They can play a really powerful role in helping with adoption there.”
Hudson represented Charlottesville in the House of Delegates for four years, and helped pass the legislation in 2020 that allowed Virginia localities to implement ranked choice voting.
Hudson said she sees ranked choice implementation in Arlington and Charlottesville as stepping stones to broader use in the Commonwealth, especially given the two localities’ history of leadership in democratic reforms, according to Hudson. Albemarle County is also now discussing ranked choice voting for county elections.
“It’s a great sign of how big, broad electoral reform movements can build up from the local level,” Hudson said.
Many members of the Charlottesville community have expressed support for the proposed ranked choice voting system, with some coming to speak at the Aug. 19 Council meeting, including city residents and an advocate from the League of Women Voters.
Nick Co, a member of Veterans for All Voters — a nonprofit that works with veterans to advocate for electoral changes — thanked the council for their help, and said that ranked choice voting will ensure that the will of the majority is more accurately represented.
“[Ranked choice voting] amplifies every voter’s voice, improves representation, allows citizens to vote their conscience without fear of wasting their vote,” Co said. “We can make Charlottesville a model for other cities in our ongoing quest to perfect our democracy.”
Justin Kirkland, politics and public policy professor, spoke on some of the advantages and drawbacks when localities use a ranked choice voting system. He said that candidates being able to endorse other candidates — which can happen as candidates are eliminated between rounds of voting in a ranked choice system — may decrease hostility in the political environment.
“There’s some evidence that suggests that ranked choice voting actually increases civility in elections,” Kirkland said. “There’s also some evidence that citizens feel a little more satisfied with the electoral process when ranked choice voting is in place.”
Kirkland also said he supports gradually rolling out voting reforms such as this one. He said that this type of policy experimentation is one of the benefits of a federal system, and that by trying reforms out at the local level first, analysts are able to examine the results before introducing them on a larger scale.
“If we’re going to make changes of a reform like nature to the way that politics works, I’d like to see them done piecemeal so that we can study them a little bit at a time,” Kirkland said. “Roll it out at localities first, and then bump it up to the state level. I think that’s a smart plan most of the time.”
Kirkland noted that ranked choice voting was not without its potential downsides, stating that it may discourage some voters from showing up on election day by changing or complicating the voting process. According to Kirkland, groups that have been historically disenfranchised may be less likely to vote if new barriers are implemented, including a more complex voting process such as ranked choice voting, where voters are more likely to make mistakes or not complete the entire ballot.
“Asking people to do a more cognitively demanding task might reduce their participation,” Kirkland said. “Folks from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or racialized minorities might be less likely to participate in politics if we add one more barrier.”
Another drawback to using ranked choice voting is that election results may not be finalized until over a week after election day if a race goes to a runoff. Yowell said that the process would take a minimum of seven days to certify the results, but would likely take up to eight or nine days due to the amount of provisional ballots — ballots given to voters whose registration or qualifications are in question — that must be counted separately from normally cast ballots.
“We have until the Monday following the election to input all of the same day registration voter data,” Yowell said. “If we do have to go to the additional rounds, it could be eight, nine days until we have a final count and all the final ballots have come in, so results are going to look a little bit different.”
City Council member Lloyd Snook expressed concern over a feature of proportional ranked choice voting in multi-seat elections, where a candidate’s surplus votes — the extra votes for the candidate after they have already crossed a given threshold to win an election — would then be distributed to whomever the second ranked candidate on those ballots is. Snook said that he would have thought this feature would be a flaw, as it only allows certain voters’ influence to carry over into the second round.
“If you’re with the winner [after the first round of voting], your influence [transfers] into the second round of voting,” Snook said. “I would have thought that it would be a bug not to allow everybody to have a meaningful role in the selection of both people.”
Along with the ordinance allowing for ranked choice voting in the June 25 primary, the Council will also vote on a resolution to appropriate $25,420 for the logistics of the implementation of ranked choice voting in Charlottesville.
Both the ordinance and the resolution will be voted on as part of the consent agenda at the Sept. 3 City Council meeting.
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