Arlington lawmakers are considering whether to allow ranked-choice voting in local primaries next year — a move that would make this D.C. suburb the first locality in Virginia to adopt the increasingly popular system as it heads into a busy spring for local politics.
The system has been used in congressional races in Alaska and Maine and the mayoral primary in New York City. This week, voters approved measures to allow ranked-choice voting in a handful of places including Portland, Ore., and Fort Collins, Colo.
In Arlington, which is filled with policy wonks and federal employees who geek out over government structure and elections, County Board Chair Katie Cristol (D) said it’s common sense to try it.
“So many of us are feeling a little powerless at a time when our democracy is starting to feel really fragile,” she said. “The idea that we can do something locally … is really heartening. There’s a real sense of good-government aspiration.”
But while Cristol said written comments on the proposal have been overwhelmingly positive, similar efforts have faced pushback elsewhere in the region.
In D.C., the local Democratic Party has opposed the measure on the grounds that it might confuse some voters. And in Richmond, local lawmakers rejected it in September, saying it could hurt poor and Black voters in a city with a long history of trying to limit Black political power.
Ranked-choice voting generally works like this: Instead of choosing just one candidate, voters can rank as many as they want in their order of preference. In the first tally, all the first-choice votes are counted, and any candidate with more than half of those votes wins the election.
But if there’s no majority, then the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Those votes are reexamined and redistributed to the candidates listed as the second choice. That process repeats until one candidate has received a majority of votes.
Virginia state Del. Sally L. Hudson (D-Charlottesville), who has been pushing the measure, said proposals are also in the works in Albemarle County and in Charlottesville and Norfolk.
“All things considered, we’re in a good place in American democracy because more people are running for office than ever before,” she said. “We need a practical way of identifying unifying candidates when we have wide, diverse fields. Ranked-choice voting solves that problem.”
She and other proponents have noted that ranked-choice voting is not necessarily a foreign concept in Arlington and Virginia. The Arlington Democrats have used it to choose candidates in a few party-run processes, such as endorsing school board candidates. The state GOP used it in its 2021 convention for governor and other statewide candidates.
Arlington is set to hold a public hearing Saturday to allow lawmakers to vote on a proposal during their December board meeting. If a proposal passes, ranked-choice voting would apply only to primaries for county board elections.
This voting system would debut in what could be an unusually crowded race for this county of about 240,000 residents. Next year’s election is the rare one when two seats on the board are on the ballot, instead of just one — and in deep-blue Arlington, the Democratic primary is often akin to the general election.
At least one of those seats will go to a new candidate. Cristol, who holds one of the seats up for election next year, has already announced that she is not running for reelection. Vice Chair Christian Dorsey (D) said in an interview that he has not decided whether he will run again.
Cristol said that next year’s “pick two” primary would serve as a strong test for the concept in Arlington before possibly rolling it out to the general election.
“In many ways, it’s the ideal year to do it,” she said. “Voters are already thinking in some ways about ranking their choices, and they are going to be most able to see the ways in which ranked-choice voting potentially influences the race.”
The possible implementation of ranked-choice voting was cheered by a small group of civic advocates who for years have pushed Arlington to rethink its government structure, including by changing how elections are run.
Ranked-choice voting “loosens up the structures around how people get elected, even if it’s only inside the primary,” said Allan Gajadhar, past president of the Civic Federation and chair of its Task Force in Governance and Election Reform (TiGER). “You’ll have more opportunity for people to run and broaden the base of people who are running.”
Because Arlington is so dominated by Democrats — just one board member since 2000 has won without the party’s backing — TiGER members say ranked-choice could also give greater voice to smaller but organized clusters of opinions within the county.
Gajadhar’s group is pushing a number of changes to the county’s government structure that its members say would seek to address Arlington’s growing population, limited political and racial diversity on the board and an overreliance on primaries.
Under a system known as the “county-manager plan” of government, all five seats on Arlington’s board are elected at-large — a rarity in the D.C. region and for counties across Virginia. There is no consistent figure such as a mayor overseeing the board; instead, its members pick a new chair among themselves at the start of every calendar year.
TiGER is set to present a plan to the Civic Federation next week with other changes in addition to ranked-choice voting: adding two members to the county board; raising salaries for elected officials; and giving longer terms for members to serve as chair.