Comments At Arlington County Board Meeting, February 22, 2025.
I applaud the County’s proposal to schedule a ranked choice election for the County Board race in November, 2025. Ranked choice voting (a/k/a RCV) is a necessary tool for gauging voter support for candidates and the policies they promote. It’s better than first past the post elections, which have produced a non-competitive political system at all levels of government.
RCV enables voters to rank candidates in order of preference and determines the winner by transferring ballots of eliminated candidates to other ranked candidates until someone gets the quorum needed to win. Thus no votes are wasted.
Yet RCV is only as good as the voters who use it, and the results of the November, 2024 County Board election suggest that most voters did not rank candidates. Instead they simply bulleted the Democrat on their ballots and ignored the others.
Confirmation of this is not available from the SBE website, which reported only the votes cast for the first ranked candidate on each ballot. But I suspect bullet voting was the operative modality in the 2024 general election, since no candidate other than me ranked anyone else on their sample ballots.
It is disingenuous for parties and candidates to extoll the merits of RCV while encouraging voters to bullet vote a single candidate. It is also unfortunate that voters waste their votes by refusing to rank other candidates.
For example, many of those who opposed Missing Middle upzoning voted a straight party ticket in 2024, despite the the fact the Democrat they elected is a staunch supporter of Missing Middle. This is as nonsensical an outcome as it is contrary to purpose of RCV.