by Ken Reid
All bills in the Virginia General Assembly to allow ranked choice voting (RCV) for town council, school board and constitutional officer elections, plus presidential primaries, were passed by indefinitely Feb. 7 by House and Senate committees, essentially being killed for this legislative session.
Even in the Democrat Senate, the RCV bill was killed unanimously.
I was disappointed: HB1751, to allow RCV in local and school board races was offered by Republican Del. Glenn Davis of Virginia Beach, as there has been widespread opposition to RCV by Virginia Republicans. However, there was some evidence RCV could have helped GOP candidates who lost recent Virginia Beach City Council elections, so maybe that’s why he patroned it.
Links and descriptions of the tabled bills are below:
- HB1751 ..Elections; ranked choice voting, local governing bodies, school boards, & primaries;
- HB2118 ..Local or constitutional office; elections allowed to be conducted by ranked choice voting;
- HB2301 ..Presidential primaries; ranked choice voting;
- HB2436 ..Primaries for federal, statewide, and General Assembly offices; ranked choice voting;
- SB1380 . ..Presidential primaries; ranked choice voting.
The group UpVote Virginia issued a call for donations to help pass RCV, just a day after all their bills were killed in Richmond.
On Monday Feb. 13, the national group, Fair Vote, which gets most of its funding from left-leaning foundations including George Soros, will hold a webinar “How RCV works in multi-winner elections.” Click here to join the webinar.
My guess is that the webinar was scheduled Feb. 13 because proponents hoped the bills would make it to the floor and to crossover. But for now, expanding RCV beyond the current law appears to be dead in Virginia.
That law, adopted when Democrats controlled the General Assembly in 2020-21, allows counties and cities to use it for their elections, but not for other local offices. Thus far, only Arlington County has opted to use it, and only in primaries for county supervisor.
My arguments against RCV were first posted here in Bacons Rebellion in December. See https://www.baconsrebellion.com/wp/?s=ranked-choice.
Ken Reid, lives in McLean. He has served on the Leesburg Town Council and Loudoun Board of Supervisors (2006-2017). He has attended numerous Republican county and state elections and was a Trump delegate to the 2016 and 2020 Republican National Convention. He is the author of “The Six Secrets to Winning Any Local Election – and Navigating Elected Office Once You Win.”
