Voters are asking for ranked choice voting – they’re just not doing it by name

When Virginia voters are asked about the political policies that affect their daily lives, things like education, healthcare, and housing are likely to top the list. Only the most diehard policy wonks might say something like “democracy reform” or more specifically “ranked choice voting.” Taken without context, this might lead someone to think of an innovation like ranked choice voting (or “RCV”) as a luxury item, something nice to have but really nothing more than an intellectual exercise.

But voters are also aware that we are in a particularly precarious time when it comes to the health of our democracy. And we know that if we’re counting on our government officials to make good policy decisions on education, healthcare, housing, etc. we have to make sure we have a way of electing people who are motivated to do that.

Ranked choice voting has proven – over decades of use in the U.S and hundreds of elections – that it is a better method of selecting candidates who accurately reflect the will of the voters. Candidates are incentivized to run more inclusive campaigns and to engage in positive, issue-based discussions rather than attack ads. Once elected, officials are incentivized to have conversations, work together, and actually find solutions because that behavior will be rewarded by voters, rather than punished by a fringe element in a punitive primary.

We cannot continue to wish for better outcomes from our government if we don’t address the systemic flaws in how we select our representatives. Our governing bodies are full of people who would really like to improve the lives of their constituents but are hindered by the backwards incentive structure that is baked into our current system. Innovative policy solutions are passed over, either because politicians are stuck in their ways or because a partisan label has already determined the only acceptable opinion on a topic.

Gov. Youngkin recently vetoed a bill that would have simply clarified the implementation of existing RCV laws, which allow localities to use RCV for their city council or county board of supervisors elections. The bill did not expand RCV or change the process for adopting it – it would have simply codified the answers to questions posed by the Department of Elections (and Youngkin’s handpicked Commissioner) in a report published in November 2023 (See our full statement on the veto here). Gov. Youngkin personally benefited from RCV in the 2021 GOP Convention where he secured his party’s gubernatorial nomination, and he doesn’t even disparage the policy in his veto – he merely says voters need more time with it so as to avoid confusion. 

The reality is, RCV has become contentious – just like housing and education and healthcare – and it got swept up in arena fights and dueling budget tours. As a result, this narrow, technical bill became a casualty of the zero-sum-game partisanship that ranked choice voting seeks to mitigate.

RCV may make not it onto voters’ lists of their top priorities, but it addresses the underlying obstacles to progress on those priorities – hyper-partisanship, fear of compromise, and unrepresentative elections. As voters, we know our politics isn’t working for us and we are asking for – screaming for – something new. So while many people may not know its name, there are plenty of people who are, in fact, asking for ranked choice voting.