Virginia Could Fall Victim to Ranked Choice Voting—Thanks to Republicans

In Virginia, some Republicans are undermining efforts by conservatives to limit or ban ranked-choice voting (RCV), claiming it helps Republicans win elections. Some RCV advocates believe Republicans owe their 2021 success in Virginia to the confusing voting mechanism and worry if voters pick the party's nominees in traditional primaries, only fringe candidates with no chance of winning general elections will emerge.

Former Republican Delegate Chris Saxman recently argued in Cardinal News that "RCV works for conservatives when they use it," adding it "reduces negative campaigning, eliminates spoiler effects, saves taxpayer money by avoiding runoffs, and helps nominate candidates who win general elections."

War of Words Among Republican Factions

Saxman's op-ed came in response to Dwayne Yancey's Cardinal News op-ed, which contended RCV advocates need to give examples where the voting system would help Republicans. Yancey noted it's "not helpful to the ranked-choice voting cause" to only show where it helps Democrats, as it would require Republican buy-in to pass statewide.

Yancey cited an op-ed by the Newport News mayor who argued for RCV because several cities, including the mayor's own, elected mayors with only a plurality. Yancey countered that several of these plurality mayors were Republicans in purple or Democrat-leaning cities, including Virginia Beach and Winchester. He also pointed to the Roanoke mayoral race as an example where RCV would hurt Republicans. There, Kamala Harris won 61 percent of the vote, but the Republican candidate came within 59 votes of winning the three-way mayoral race. If Roanoke adopted RCV, it would forever preclude the possibility of a Republican becoming the city's mayor. 

What advantage is there, Yancey asks, for Republicans to change a system in which they're already gaining power in purple counties and cities and have hope of occasionally winning upsets in blue strongholds?

Saxman doesn't give any actual examples of RCV helping Virginia Republicans or where it would have helped Virginia Republicans. Instead, he reiterates Virginia Republican Chairman Rich Anderson's opinion that RCV helped the party nominate general election winners in 2021. He also points to Republican primary voters' satisfaction in the 10th Congressional District at using RCV to nominate candidates—a poor example, considering every Republican candidate since 2016 has gotten blown out in the 10th.

Oddly, Saxman points to Yancey's example of Lynchburg's Ward IV city council race as a reason to implement RCV. In that race, a write-in conservative challenger kept the victorious establishment Republican incumbent below 50 percent of the vote. Yancey notes that there is so much bad blood in the Lynchburg Republican civil war that if Lynchburg had RCV, the write-in's voters would likely have voted for the Democrat as their second choice out of spite, denying the GOP that city council seat. It's unclear how Saxman thinks adopting RCV would help Republicans—when a Republican just won it without it.

But traditional first-past-the-post primaries have been nominating candidates who win general elections for over a century, the money it takes to educate voters on RCV will offset any savings from avoiding run-offs, and spoiler effects and negative campaigning are just facts of democracy—a sometimes messy form of government moderate consensus elites have never really liked.

(READ MORE: Ranked-Choice Voting is for Communists)

RCV Mission Creep in Virginia

In 2020, Virginia passed legislation that allows ranked choice voting at the county and municipal level if a majority vote of the board of supervisors or city council approves it. The legislation expires in 2031, meaning localities have a diminishing window to implement it unless the General Assembly renews it—which is hopefully unlikely if Republicans maintain control of the governor's office.

Despite giving counties and cities the option to adopt RCV, only Arlington County and the city of Charlottesville adopted it by the 2024 election—it doesn't go into effect in Charlottesville until 2025—showing how unpopular the system remains. 

In Arlington County, an RCV advocate admitted to WTOP News that confusion about the voting practice created the biggest problem implementing it, and multiple voters told the local news outlet they only voted for their preferred candidate or had to rely on election volunteers to explain how the new voting system works.

In Charlottesville, former Democratic Delegate Sally Hudson—who helped pass the 2020 bill—claimed the city had a storied history of using RCV because 20 years ago, University of Virginia students started using it in their student council elections.

A local schoolteacher argued for adopting it in Charlottesville because the 11- and 12-year-olds in her classroom use it to help her make decisions.

Adopting RCV is not easy or cheap for local communities to implement. In Oregon, a handful of local registrars were so fearful of how hard it would make their jobs that they banded together and formed a super PAC to oppose it. Despite being outspent 10,000–1, they helped defeat it by double digits this November. When Maine became the first state to implement RCV statewide, proponents felt compelled to produce a 19-page instruction manual on how to use it. 

Lauren Eddy, general registrar and director of elections in Albemarle County, said if the county adopts RCV, the costs for software upgrades, equipment, and voter education could rise to at least $70,000.

Clara Belle Wheeler, vice chair of the Albemarle County electoral board and a senior fellow at the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, argued against adopting it, noting the elderly, less well-informed, and less well-educated could become disenfranchised because, although they may like the one candidate they want to win, they're unlikely to learn enough about the other candidates on the ballot to rank them. Although some found her comments insensitive, research by Princeton Professor Nolan McCarty and the results of the recent RCV city council election in Portland, Oregon back her assertion.

RCV as an Establishment Gatekeeper's Tool

At the pro-RCV group UpVote's bipartisan rollout in 2022, former Virginia Gov. George Allen (R) praised the Virginia GOP's use of RCV in its 2021 nominating convention, arguing it helped the party sweep every statewide office in the general election. 

In an interview with the R Street Institute—a "sometimes libertarian" think tank the Left uses as its token right-of-center ally—Saxman praised RCV because it "discouraged candidates from engaging in negative campaigning against their opponents out of fear of dropping down in voters’ rankings for going negative." But a system that chills free speech among candidates should raise questions about whose interests it serves. If underdog candidates fear to attack corrupt, hypocritical, or establishment-backed incumbents because they could lose the incumbents' locked-in supporters' second-choice votes, the democratic process suffers.

Furthermore, Allen and Saxman's 2021 example of why RCV works for Republicans is shortsighted for a couple of reasons. Like MAGA Republicans who argue no other candidate could have beaten Hilary Clinton in 2016, Virginia Republicans have no way of knowing if alternate nominees would have won any or all those statewide races in 2021. General elections are unpredictable, and just as enough voters may have concluded Clinton was dangerous enough to elect Ted Cruz in 2016, enough moderate Virginia voters may have concluded that excluding parents from public education and allowing boys access to girls' bathroom stalls was enough to vote Republican no matter who led the ticket.

But in the 2021 case, such speculation is unnecessary. Gov. Glenn Youngkin won the first round of RCV primary vote counting and maintained his lead in each subsequent count until his competitors were eliminated—as did Attorney General Jason Miyares, and Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears. The argument at which Republican RCV advocates hint—the need for RCV to keep the party's base from nominating unelectable candidates—doesn't hold water. Mitt Romney fairly won the Republican nomination in 2012 without the help of RCV by appealing to enough voters to his Right. 

Citing the 2021 Virginia GOP nomination process as a success story also does not address how an RCV general election would look. It's great if RCV can produce winning candidates to take on Democrats—a correlation its advocates haven't proven—but if the state adopted RCV the way Alaska did, Virginia would eliminate its primaries altogether.

A four-way RCV general election in a purple state like Virginia would likely feature a conservative, a moderate Republican, a center-left Democrat, and a far-Left Democrat. The second-choice votes from the moderate Republican and far-Left Democrat would easily push the center-left Democrat over the top in every election. The same would hold in a three-way RCV race. No conservative would ever get enough second-choice votes to win. Considering Virginia's Republican voters skew less college educated than the state's Democratic voters, the confusion of RCV would disenfranchise more of them on the second RCV count, making it more difficult for even an establishment-approved candidate like Youngkin to win an RCV general election.

(READ MORE: Ranked-Choice Voting Will Turn Georgia Blue)

Democrats Confess Why They Support RCV

Yancey's challenge to RCV advocates to produce evidence the system would help Republicans win elections still stands, as does the reason he felt compelled to issue it. Establishment liberals tend not to appeal to the Republican base for their election "reform" ideas because they believe conservative ideas are unpopular with the masses. If the Right wins, they generally assume something is flawed with campaign finance or election laws. If anything, mainstream Democrats who support RCV are very open about using it to keep the Right out of office. 

Hudson, who also happens to be a UVA public policy and economics professor, told the Daily Progress she sees RCV as a way to heal much of what’s broken in American democracy, "especially in a city like Charlottesville that’s seen firsthand just how far over the edge political extremism has gotten." She argued if the Republican Party used RCV in 2016, Trump would likely have never won the nomination. Like the out-of-state liberal mega donors bankrolling RCV efforts in various states, academic experts like Hudson view forcing moderate, technocratic choices onto voters as almost a civic duty to protect society from the political extremism to which the masses gravitate.

Immediately after Allen spoke at UpVote's event, U.S. Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) characterized RCV in harshly partisan terms, praising it as a way to mitigate the rise of "extreme polarization" and mistrust of institutions by strengthening democracy after "a former president and his allies try to overturn a free and fair election."

This year, Beyer cosponsored the Ranked Choice Voting Act with Deep State champion Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). If passed, the bill would force all Congressional primaries and general elections to adopt RCV.

Conservatives should oppose RCV in Virginia for the simple reason that it prevents their side from winning. 

Republican establishment types like Saxman, Allen, and Anderson appear to see RCV as a gatekeeper's tool to guide GOP nominations toward candidates whom squishy moderates find acceptable. Either they personally see no need of course correction in the Washington, D.C. consensus that bleeds across the Virginia state line or they don't want to put in the hard work to convince comfortable middle-class voters of it. Moderate and establishment Republicans don't need elites to rig the voting process in their favor. They just need to put in the effort to win over skeptical conservative voters in primaries—like Romney did—and put in the work in the general election to win over skeptical moderates—like Trump did twice.

 (READ MORE: Voters Roundly Reject Ranked-Choice Voting Despite Millions from Megadonors)