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Virginia's First Ranked-choice Election Is Vexing Some Arlington Voters
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Arlington's local elections office turned down $50,000 offered by county lawmakers for outreach and education efforts around ranked-choice voting. County lawmakers had initially estimated spending $50,000 on outreach and education efforts. The local elections office, an independent entity, said the state would handle the effort instead. The article has been updated.
As voters in Virginia head to the polls Tuesday in heated primaries, the results could reshape both a closely divided state legislature in Richmond and local governments in the D.C. Suburbs, affecting hot-button issues like abortion and how counties spend their money, prosecute crime and build new housing.
In Arlington County, many won't be watching just to see who wins. The Democratic primary for county board in this deep-blue suburb will be the first publicly run election in the state to be decided via ranked-choice voting, putting this increasingly popular voting system to the test in a tight, consequential race.
Voters are able to "rank" up to three candidates on their ballots in the race for two open spots on the party's ticket. Advocates for ranked-choice voting have cheered this pilot initiative, saying it will lead to results that better reflect the will of the electorate.
But there seems to be one hiccup so far: Not many people understand how it works on the back end.
"I don't know that it has been properly communicated to the community," said Kevin Saucedo-Broach, a former candidate in the Democratic primary for an Arlington-based seat in the House of Delegates. "We're just going to let people walk into the polls and kind of hope for the best? That's not even the bare minimum."
Saucedo-Broach said he is not opposed to the idea on paper. Like many others, he hopes the system might reduce political polarization and offer more representation for minority blocs.
But he is one of several Arlington politicos who say local and state government officials haven't conducted enough outreach to educate voters about the new process — a call that's coming from an unusually wide mix of people.
Much of the frustration has focused on the wonky, hard-to-follow way that votes are counted: Because ranked-choice voting is being used to pick not one but two nominees, critics say the tabulation methods are unfamiliar, confusing or even undemocratic.
Gretchen Reinemeyer, Arlington's registrar and director of elections, said her office has not hidden the mechanics of the plan, which follows state-mandated rules that are meant to have a low barrier to entry for voters.
The results from early voting have not been cause for too much alarm. About 3 percent of early voters to date have "spoiled" or filled out their ballots incorrectly, she said, which is "slightly higher" than in previous elections.
Still, as other jurisdictions in Virginia and around the country consider whether to follow suit, the emerging pushback — even in a mostly wealthy, highly educated place like this one — may offer a cautionary tale for lawmakers and advocates hoping to implement the practice in their own communities.
Ranked-choice voting is making its debut in a banner election year for Arlington.
With no incumbents on the ballot, six candidates are competing in a Democratic primary that has largely centered on questions of housing density. Candidates who win the party's backing have tended to dominate local elections, so the June race is often seen as tantamount to the general election.
Given the importance of the primary, critics like Saucedo-Broach said the materials put out by state and local elections officials do not adequately explain what it means to use "proportional ranked-choice voting" in a two-winner race. Resources are even more slim, he said, for voters who do not speak English or struggle with technology.
Reinemeyer said her office has worked with state officials and nonpartisan advocacy groups to educate voters about the practice, distributing pamphlets at polling sites, presenting to neighborhood and civic groups and rolling out online resources. (Andrea Gaines, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Elections, referred a request for comment to Reinemeyer.)
Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey (D) said he, too, recognizes the concerns.
"I get it. It's certainly imperfect," Dorsey said of the specifics of the counting system. "We always knew there was going to be a learning curve with ranked-choice voting. Add to that the fact that it is a different form than people are familiar with, and it adds to the complexity."
How it works
Instructions at the ballot box for voters in Arlington's county board race are fairly similar to those in recent, high-profile ranked-choice contests, such as the Virginia GOP's 2021 gubernatorial convention, the New York City mayoral primary that year, or a special congressional election in Alaska last summer.
Voters rank the candidates in their order of preference. They cannot rank the same candidate twice. (Arlington will only allow up to three candidates to be ranked, due to the limited capacity of its voting machines.)
In "single-winner" races like the one in Alaska, ballots are counted this way: First-choice votes are tallied, and the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated. Ballots that ranked the eliminated candidate first are reassigned to the voter's second choice. The process is repeated, whittling down the field one by one until there's a winner.
Counting votes in Arlington's "multi-winner" contest is more complicated. Because multiple candidates are being selected, some of them may win the necessary number of votes in an earlier round. If a candidate reaches this winning threshold before anyone else, a fraction of the ballot that ranked the winning candidate first is passed onto the voter's second (or third) choice.
Liz White, the executive director of the ranked-choice advocacy group UpVote Virginia, compares it to every voter going to the polls with one dollar.
"If your candidate wins easily and it only costs you 90 cents [to get them to the necessary threshold to win], you get 10 cents of change you can apply towards another candidate," she said. Likewise, if your favorite candidate is eliminated, your entire dollar can go to your second choice.
Deborah Short, who attended a League of Women Voters presentation on this ranked-choice voting system, called it "a deeply flawed process that will disenfranchise its citizens."
"There are two seats open for County Board," she said, "but I am unlikely to have an opportunity to cast one full vote for each seat."
A candidate who is universally ranked as a second choice but receives no first-place votes may not have much of a chance, she added.
White noted that while the previous method did give each voter two votes, it meant that the threshold for victory was much lower. (The last time there was a wide-open, two-seat race in Arlington, each winning candidate netted about 22 percent of the vote, while the winners in this primary will need to receive more than 33 percent of the vote.)
The largest voting bloc can determine both winners, and the winning candidates would not represent as broad a consensus. Voters are incentivized to vote for just one candidate to maximize their chances.
Proponents of the "proportional ranked-choice voting," then, say it ensures all votes can actually count. Voters get only one whole vote, but it ends up going further.
Lack of outreach alleged
Not all multi-winner ranked-choice races use the same method of calculation as the one in Arlington. But it's the rule in Virginia.
After the General Assembly voted to allow Arlington to test out ranked-choice voting, the state's electoral board — an independent body appointed by the governor — passed changes that require the county to use a proportional ranked-choice (also known as "single transferrable vote") system, said Bob Brink, the board's former chair.
Chris Hughes, policy director at the nonpartisan Ranked Choice Voting Resource Center — which is working with Virginia elections officials on the Arlington primary — said that such a practice has been used for about a century in Ireland and 70 years in Australia.
A handful of smaller localities in the United States — including Cambridge, Mass., and Eastpointe, Mich., — have relied on proportional ranked-choice, the same system as Arlington's, to elect their local government bodies, he said. Minneapolis has used the system for more than a decade, but only in more obscure municipal elections.
County lawmakers had initially estimated spending $50,000 on outreach and education efforts. The local elections office, an independent entity, said the state would handle the effort instead.
Although former leaders at the Virginia Department of Elections said individual localities would have to fund their own education efforts, current state elections officials offered to pay a PR firm to distribute online and print resources to the state.
But Saucedo-Broach said the resulting outreach from the state was lacking. He received pamphlets at the polls from UpVote and the state's election agency, which explained single-winner ranked-choice voting but not the particular counting system for Arlington's primary. Two other handouts displayed QR codes, he said, and neither were in languages other than English.
"An online orientation video on YouTube is not going to reach someone like my mother," he said, "because she doesn't know what YouTube is. And she's a White lady from Virginia. I haven't even started with immigrants."
Arlington NAACP President Mike Hemminger echoed those concerns, writing in a statement that the lack of outreach prompted "a series of grave concerns from our community." He said his group would be monitoring ranked-choice to ensure "no one's foundational right to vote becomes disenfranchised or impeded."
Gaines, a spokeswoman for the state elections agency, referred a request for comment to Reinemeyer.
Reinemeyer, who was recently appointed to another term, said her office and White's at UpVote Virginia held about 25 information sessions in total to any group who asked, as well as a training for the candidates and their campaigns. Time for outreach was limited, she added, as she had no way to know if there would be enough candidates for a primary until the filing deadline in mid-April.
"Our materials are there. They're available," she said. Any criticisms are "not coming to us, and we can't fix anything if we don't know what's broken."
And in any case, White said the act of voting in a ranked-choice race is relatively straightforward.
"Your job is easy," she said. "You just rank one, two and three, and you can understand as much or as little of the tabulation process as you would like."
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