By Steve Haner
Virginia’s experiment with ranked choice voting may soon expand to a second locality, as the Charlottesville City Council is now considering that method for its future local elections. It is time for more people to pay attention to this voting method and decide whether they think it is a good idea.
The pros and cons are complex, and opinions are strong on both sides. Current Virginia elections allow a victory with a plurality, often far less than a majority of the votes cast. Making voters declare a second or third (or fourth or fifth) choice and continuing to count until a majority is reached is a major shift in our elections.
Former Virginia Delegate Sally Hudson, a Charlottesville Democrat, is leading one Virginia-based effort to expand the process here, Ranked Choice Virginia. Another, UpVote Virginia touts its bipartisan support, mentioning Congressman Don Beyer (D) and former Governor George Allen (R). The Foundation for Government Accountability, a national group on the other side, considers the idea a disaster.
It is one thing to use the method in a party nomination contest, as Virginia Republicans did when they chose Glenn Youngkin as their nominee in 2021. It may also be an attractive option when electing a local governing body that runs at-large, say, with ten candidates seeking five seats.
But would we really want the second-choice votes of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s voters determining the outcome of Virginia’s 2024 presidential contest? It is perfectly conceivable that the first-round result would be a close election, neither party nominee with 50%, and then a small handful of RFK voters could flip the outcome and award Virginia’s 13 electoral votes to the person in second place on election night.
Once you decide that Virginia should make this philosophical shift away from allowing a plurality to prevail, then the technical questions come up. One of the strongest arguments against this new method is its complexity and the likelihood many voters will be confused and even frustrated, especially in those cases where they do have to go beyond just a second choice.
For several years I have served as the ballot officer in my local precinct, handing out and tracking the paper ballots and dealing with any questions from voters about how to mark them. Every year a fair number spoil their ballots by either using an X or a circle rather than filling in the bubble, or by marking a name they didn’t intend. It is safe to predict that with this method 1) there will be far more spoiled ballots; and 2) voters will be standing longer in the booth to fill them out, adding to the lines.
But in researching this column and looking at the rules Virginia has already created as Arlington County moved into this brave new world, another of my major concerns is allayed. The State Board of Elections has even posted an instructional video. The election officers at the end of election day will only report the first-round result. If a candidate has achieved a majority, that is the end of it. If not, they aren’t the people who keep counting.
If a candidate has not achieved a majority after the absentee and provisional ballots are reviewed and added to round one, that is when the second (or third or fourth) round counts proceed. That post-election process becomes far more important.
But the idea that many elections (perhaps most) would now spark a full recount process, such as the Fifth Congressional District primary just went through, raises its own issues. Cost will be high on the list. The long delays in knowing who won will also frustrate people. Some advocates claim a computer ballot box can do all the counts at once, but those who already doubt the security of the counting machines will double down on their conspiracy theories.
The most recent Democratic primary in Arlington County took four rounds of counting to reach a result.
Some complain that the ranked choice voting process will favor one party over the other, but that is not apparent. Using the excuse of COVID, Virginia’s Democrats enacted a host of voting changes that many Republicans opposed. But more and more Republicans are beginning to just take advantage of those rules to boost turnout of their own voters.
Once political tacticians begin to grasp the ranked voting process, there likely will be changes. More candidates who fail to get the party nomination will still put their names on the ballot. People may be recruited to join the ballot to boost and broaden that party’s turnout. Then as the lesser candidates fall off in subsequent rounds, their second-round votes may shift to the dominant candidate.
People will begin to consciously campaign to be that second choice and, behind the scenes, a bit of deal-making is easy to predict. Will that lead to more civil discourse in elections? One can dream.
One major concern raised by the Foundation for Government Accountability rings true. For an individual’s ballot to be counted in all subsequent rounds, they must rank all the candidates. Otherwise, their vote could drop off; it becomes an “exhausted ballot.” But why would you mark your ballot for somebody you truly oppose?
Is it the case that the final “50 percent plus one” that finally wins does not include the many exhausted ballots, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them in a statewide election? If so, Virginia could be back where it began, allowing a plurality of cast votes to prevail.
First published today by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy.
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