Learn

Here is the ballot from Arlington's most recent County Board race. There were four candidates running for one open seat. Each candidate is listed in a row with a separate oval for each choice. Voters could select their favorite candidate in the 1st column, their second favorite in column 2, and so on. Unlike traditional, single-choice elections, RCV lets voters share how they feel about all the options, not just one.

No. You should rank at least one candidate as your 1st choice. After that, you can rank as many of the rest as you want. 

It's a good idea to rank all the candidates. Ranking all of them ensures that your vote will be used to select the winner — even if your favorite doesn't win — and you won't hurt your favorite candidate by ranking more.

No. You can only use each ranking once. You should rank your favorite candidate first and use your other choices for the other candidates.

Most elections have one winner, like a mayor or a governor. In a ranked choice election with one winner, the winning candidate doesn't just have to earn the most votes. The winner has to earn a majority of votes.

Sometimes a candidate will earn a majority in the very first round. For example, in Arlington's recent County Board race, the winning candidate earned 58% of the first-choice votes, so it only took one round to find the majority winner.

But if no candidate earns at least half the first-choice votes, we hold an "instant runoff" to find the winner with majority support. In each round, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and their supporters' votes are transferred to their next choice until we find the winner with broadest support. In the June 2024 primary for Arlington County Board, there were five candidates, and it took all five rounds to determine the winner. In the final round, JD Spain won the nomination with 52% of the votes.

Some offices – like Charlottesville City Council and Arlington County Board – have more than one winner per election. Ranked-choice elections with more than one winner are a lot like the single-winner version, but with two extra details:

1. Each candidate needs fewer votes to win.
2. If a candidate gets more votes than they need to win, their extra votes go to their supporters' next choices.

How many votes does it take to win?

In a ranked choice election with one winner, a candidate needs at least ½ the votes to win because if one person has more than ½ the votes, we know all the other candidates must have less ½. 

The same principle applies to elections with more than one winner. 

1. If there are two winners, each winner needs at least ⅓ of the votes. If two candidates each have more than ⅓ , then all the other candidates must have less than ⅓, so we know those two must be the top two.
2. In a three-seat race, each winner needs ¼ of the votes. If three people each have more than ¼, then all the other candidates must have less than ¼, and we know those three must be the top three.

In general, if a race has N open seats, each winner needs at least 1 / (N + 1) votes to win a seat. With more than one winner, ranked choice voting provides proportional representation so that candidates win seats in rough proportion to their share of the electorate.

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What happens if a candidate gets more votes than they need to win?

Then their extra votes go to their supporters' next choices.

Remember: the goal of ranked choice is to give everyone the freedom to vote for who they really like without fear of "wasting" their vote, so once your favorite candidate has enough votes to win, your support will go to your next choice. You don't have to worry about supporting someone who's too popular, just like you don't have to worry about supporting someone who's not popular enough.

No. If a candidate gets enough votes in the first round, there's no need to use second choices to find the winner. Your other choices will only be used if more rounds are needed to find the winner. In Arlington's recent County Board race, the winning candidate earned 58% of the first-choice votes, so only one round was needed.

With ranked choice ballots, you can vote for who you really like without fear of wasting your vote. If it turns out your favorite candidate can't win, you can still have a say in the final winner by ranking other candidates. You don't have to worry about accidentally helping the candidates you like least by voting for the person you like most.

Because RCV eliminates the fear that similar candidates will split a voting bloc, RCV encourages candidates to embrace what they have in common and draw distinctions based on substantive issues. Sometimes RCV candidates will even appear in joint campaign ads! RCV encourages candidates to build coalitions and earn support from a wide range of voters

Ranked choice is used in some of the most diverse cities in the country – New York City, Oakland, Sante Fe, Minneapolis – and has a proven record of increasing diversity among elected officials. In New York City, for example, RCV helped produce the first majority-female city council in NYC history. After RCV adoption, the 51-member NYC Council went from just 10 women to 31 women with 26 women of color.

Exit polls consistently show that the vast majority of voters report understanding ranked choice after just one use and support using RCV in future elections. Research also finds voters' self-reported understanding increases as communities use RCV year after year. An exit poll conducted after Arlington's June 2024 election found that 88% of surveyed voters thought marking the ballot was easy and 67% would like to use ranked choice in future elections.

The main cost of RCV adoption is voter education. All of Virginia's 133 localities already have RCV-capable voting hardware, and the State Board of Elections has already purchased RCV software from the national RCV Resource Center.

In Virginia, yes, but that's a choice of the State Board of Elections and not a technical limitation of RCV. Virginia's current RCV regulations instruct localities to only report preliminary results for first-choice votes on election night. Complete, round-by-round results are then released after absentee ballots are due on the Friday after the election.

According to the national RCV Resource Center, a better practice is for election administrators to release preliminary results for all rounds on election night, as they would for any other election. Results can then be updated as the final ballots are counted over time. Just like a single-choice election, the late-arriving ballots will only change the final results if the race is especially close

Virginia law currently allows localities to use RCV to elect their city council and county board members. Legislation has been introduced but not yet passed that would allow RCV in elections for all local offices. RCV is not yet permitted in elections for state or federal office, except in party-run nominating contests, like conventions.

In 2023, Arlington became the first Virginia locality to conduct an RCV election. Charlottesville will become the second in June 2025. The Virginia Republican party has also used ranked-choice ballots at conventions to nominate candidates for statewide offices and Congressional districts VA-04, VA-10, and VA-11.

Alaska and Maine use RCV in all of their state and federal elections. In addition, more than 50 cities and counties use RCV in local elections, from big cities like New York City and Minneapolis to small towns in Utah, Colorado, and Vermont. In 2024, DC voters overwhelming supported a ballot measure to adopt RCV for their elections, too.