Column: Time for Virginia to embrace ranked-choice voting
By Mayor Phillip Jones Guest columnist
Though the 2024 elections held the nation in suspense, the results confirmed what we already knew: Our country is divided between two warring parties that each draw votes from roughly half the people. Amid such deep divisions, it’s tempting to conclude that Americans can’t agree on anything, but the truth is we share common ground on a wide range of issues. The vast majority of voters support popular proposals on core issues such as job training and health care. So why don’t we see candidates emerge who can bridge the divide and unite voters around priorities they already share?
The answer lies in a simple but overlooked feature of American elections. In most of our elections, voters can only support one candidate — no matter how many candidates run. That simple principle may sound sensible, but it poses a challenging risk. If a new candidate enters a race and attempts to bridge the gap between the frontrunners, the entrant risks dividing the voters and tipping the race toward a candidate they like least. The vote-splitting problem only gets worse as more candidates run. The wider the field, the fewer votes the winner may need to come out ahead.
As a result, winners in multi-candidate races often emerge without support from the majority of voters. Richmond, Roanoke, Winchester and Virginia Beach all elected mayors this year in wide-field races with a winner who earned less than half the votes. In my own four-way race for mayor of Newport News in 2022, I won with 40% of the votes, which means nearly 60% of the voters supported someone else. Though I’m proud to serve our city, I’d much rather build a winning coalition from a broader range of residents.
There’s a practical solution to the vote-splitting problem, and it’s called ranked-choice voting. In a ranked-choice election, you don’t just vote for one candidate. You get to rank the candidates in the order that you like them — your first choice, second choice, third choice and so on. The ballots are then tallied in an instant runoff, where the last-place finisher is eliminated in each round, and their supporters’ votes transfer to the next choice on their ballots. The instant runoff continues until the top candidate emerges with majority support. In the process, voters get the freedom to express how they feel about all the options — without fear of wasting their votes — and candidates get rewarded for building coalitions around the issues that matter most, so we all get elected leaders who better reflect the wide range of people they serve.
Given the benefits of ranked-choice voting, communities across the country are making the switch. Arlington used ranked choice to elect its county board this fall, and Charlottesville will use ranked choice to elect its city council next year. They’re joining more than 50 communities nationwide that already hold ranked-choice elections, from major cities such as New York, Minneapolis and Santa Fe, to smaller towns in Utah, Colorado and Vermont. Last week, more than 70% of Washington, D.C., voters approved a ballot measure to adopt ranked choice for their elections, too.
Exit polls from ranked-choice elections consistently show that voters understand the new system once they see it in action, and they prefer ranked-choice ballots to the old-school, single-choice method. Turns out voters like having options and candidates who are focused more on what we have in common than divide-and-conquer games.
For now, Virginia law only permits localities to use ranked choice in elections for city council and county board, but this year’s elections show it’s time for the General Assembly to expand that authority to all local offices. As we look toward the next legislative session, I hope our state leaders in Richmond will support expanding ranked-choice voting and bring better elections to us all.
Phillip Jones is the mayor of Newport News. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and served as a Marine Corps infantry officer before earning his master’s degrees in business and public policy from Harvard University.
